I first got a taste of Pearland Coffee Roasters back in 2015 when they were featured in MyCoffeePub’s monthly subscription, but more recently Pearland’s roaster, John Sanson, reached out to send some new coffees my way. This morning I’m looking at a single origin offering from Nicaragua, so let’s check it out!
Purchase this coffee directly for $15.50/12oz
PEARLAND COFFEE ROASTERS NICARAGUA FINCA LA NEUTRAL
Pearland Coffee Roasters is located in Pearland, TX, a community just south of Houston, on the other side of the ring road that surrounds the city. Pearland Coffee Roasters has been around since about 2010 and the brand basically took over the Antigua Coffee House that had been around even before that. It has been a few years since my last trip to the Houston area, but my impressions in the past were that there isn’t a lot of specialty coffee going on there, so it’s nice to see Pearland Coffee Roasters carrying the flag of quality coffee in that city!
The first thing that struck me was the new(er) packaging. The last time I had Pearland coffee in 2015 it was in a Kraft bag with a simple white label. They’ve upgraded to those flat-bottom “zipper” bags everyone seems to be using (and, thankfully, because I love those bags) now and the bags are nicely clad in brown and mustard with a white label showing the origin, variety, processing method, producer and flavor notes in a concise and clear way. This morning’s coffee is their direct trade Nicaraguan selection from Finca La Neutral in the Jinotega region. This is a washed Caturra lot with flavor notes of, “Blueberry, honey, cinnamon.” I used my standard pouorver setup of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper and a Handground grinder set to 3. I also found this coffee to work nicely as espresso and I have some notes on that later.
This cup has a sweet, inviting, lightly spiced aroma pouring off it. After a significant cooldown period (critical to really tasting coffee) I am greeted by a heavy-bodied coffee with milk-like mouthfeel. This feels like a really dense coffee on my palate. It has a thick, dense, honey-like sweetness and the sweetness carries a lot of spicy notes with it. Think warming or baking spices like cinnamon, cardamom, ginger and the like, even though I’m not sure I’m actually tasting any of those, that’s the vibe that spiced note gives off. This coffee definitely leans into the sweet side of the spectrum, but there is enough acidity to pull it back from being cloying. I get some malic acidity in the sip, which is the main acid found in apples. There’s that same crispness I get from Honeycrisp, Fuji and Gala apples and a hint of green apple tartness in the acid profile. There’s a borderline note of citrus in there, too, but I’m thinking more apple-like acidity for this cup, which works great with the heavy body, sweetness and spicy notes. This is a relatively low complexity coffee, but it more than makes up for it with drinkability, density and that warm, inviting and familiar flavor profile that wraps my palate up like an electric blanket on a cold night!
Espresso
I tried this coffee out a couple different ways as espresso and they both worked nicely. For a shorter duration but longer volume pull I was doing around 20g of coffee in with about 43g out in around 27 seconds. This was a brighter shot with a little more body and a stiffer crema. This morning I tightened the grinder up one step and I used about 19.5g of coffee with about 40g yield, but it took about 36 seconds to get there. Nice crema, again and, surprisingly, this shot had a little less body, but it was more balanced and more delicious, to my palate. Sweet, spicy, lots of nuttiness and some lemon candy acidity. A great compromise between a traditional Italian shot and a more third wavey, brighter espresso. Very good! For the equipment dorks, my espresso setup is a Gaggia Classic with a pretty well-tuned OPV, Rancilio Rocky espresso-exclusive grinder, Decent Espresso precision 20g basket and calibrated 25lb tamper.
