The Peruvian coffees are starting to march into World Domination Headquarters and this one didn’t have far to go! Today’s coffee was roasted by Zach Tarhini of Meta Coffee Roasting Co., located right here in Kansas City! Meta Coffee is a one-man micro-roasting operation that started, as many do, serving coffee at local farmer’s market’s. You’ll be able to find Zach at the Brookside Farmers’ Market again this year (opens in May) serving cold brewed coffee as well as iced coffee with cream and brown sugar simple syrup. Yum! Zach dropped off a sample of his cold brew the first time I tried his coffee and it’s one of my favorites. If this summer ends up being as hot and humid as it seems like it’s going to be, he’s going to be Mr. Popularity in Brookside on Saturday mornings! You can also find Meta Coffee by the bag at Nature’s Own Health Market in KC and The Merc in Lawrence, on the bar at One More Cup, and this coffee is currently being served at the Brew Gallery in Lenexa, KS.
This coffee is an organic coffee from Peru, sourced by Midwest Coffee Traders, also here in the KC area. The grower is Roby Lavan Guerrero, whose Finca La Flor del Sapote is located in the Cajamarca growing region of Peru. It’s a washed coffee, grown in the 1750masl range and consists of Caturra, Typica and Pache varietals. You can buy this coffee directly from Meta Coffee for $9.25/8oz bag.
Peru has a lot of challenges as a coffee-growing country, mainly because so many of the farms are small and very remote, without roads or any infrastructure to transport the coffee. Peru has all the amenities that specialty coffee plants need to grow well, but it’s the infrastructure required to move it where it needs to go, and when, that is the problem. That being said, excellent coffees do make it out of Peru, with Messenger’s Jacinto Jara I reviewed recently as an example.
This Flor del Sapote is a clean and easy drinking coffee. At warmer temps it wasn’t much to write home about, but as it cools off and opens up it picks up a lot of character and turns into a really nice cup. I used my notNeutral Gino pourover with Kalita 185 filters and a 1:16 brew ratio for this. Brew times were in the 3:30-3:45 range for 28g of coffee and 450g of water. I actually enjoyed this coffee the more it cooled down, so I hope Zach uses this for his cold brew for a while because I think it’d be great! My nose wasn’t picking up much in the aroma from the cup. The body on this coffee is medium with a relatively short aftertaste and a dry finish. It’s sweet, overall, with a red apple brightness and sweetness as the cup cools. I found this same malic acidity in the Jacinto Jara from Peru I mentioned earlier. Zach’s roasting brought out a buttery flavor, too, that pairs really well with the apple notes. There is a hint of tartness that hit the edges of my tongue, too, giving more of a green, tart apple vibe, too. That gets more pronounced as the cup cools.
This isn’t a very complex coffee and I’m fine with that. Sometimes you trade drinkability for complexity, so a simple, easy drinker can be a nice thing. The buttery apple flavors in this cup are simple, recognizable and clean and they work well with the sweetness of the cup. The finish was a little on the dry side for me, but that’s a very small “gripe” for an otherwise clean and delicious coffee from Meta Coffee Roasting Co. here in Kansas City!