This month’s MyCoffeePub.com selection landed on Friday and it’s from local legends, PT’s Coffee Roasting Co.! This is like when the chocolate guy and the peanut butter guy run into one another and Reese’s peanut butter cups were formed. Let’s drink!
Purchase this coffee directly for $21/12oz
The Day I Visited PT’s and Hung Out With The Owners
MYCOFFEEPUB 1/2018: PT’S COFFEE ROASTING CO. GEDEO NATURAL
If you’ve read KC Coffee Geek for a while you know I get pretty giddy when, during the middle of the month, a mystery package from MyCoffeePub.com arrives on my doorstep. They don’t do teasers, they don’t do hints… it just arrives and it’s a total secret what’s inside. This is a unique type of coffee subscription (one coffee, once a month, you get what you get… and if you want more than one bag, there are 2 and 4 bag options) and I LOVE it. The MCP gang has very good taste and they always pick good roasters and excellent coffees and I couldn’t be happier with the service. This month is even better because the featured roaster is PT’s, a local legend in the Kansas City area and really in the specialty coffee world as a whole!
PT’s has been at it since 1993 and it’d be fair to call owners Jeff Taylor and Fred Polzin OG’s in the specialty coffee world (and, hey, let’s throw Maritza, Jeff’s lovely wife, in as an owner, too. As one of Colombia’s first handful of Q-graders, she has been involved in quality control in coffee since 1999). For being such a “big” and well-established company, it’s a relatively small operation. I wrote a lot about this in my article when I got to hang out with Jeff and Maritza for a day back in the summer of 2015. Since then, they’ve expanded to a new cafe in Lawrence, KS and also totally rebranded their identity, which looks great. PT’s values responsible sourcing above all else, with great roasting coming in at a very close second. They’re a quality operation and even though they started in Topeka, about an hour away, Kansas City adopted them as locals the second they opened a cafe here in town and installed one of the city’s two Slayer espresso machines! LOL
I could go on and on about both of these companies, so let’s get to the coffee! MyCoffeePub selected PT’s Gedeo Natural for this month’s coffee. It’s a natural Ethiopian coffee, meaning the coffee cherries are picked and sorted by hand, then laid out on raised mesh beds and rotated frequently as they dry, like raisins. Natural processing is super labor-intensive, but it uses a lot less water and, in the end, the coffee seeds inside (what we call coffee “beans”) absorb a lot of sweetness and fruity flavors along the way. I know PT’s are picky about their naturals, so I’m really looking forward to this. This coffee was grown in the Gedeo region of Ethiopia, and it is multiple varieties (thousands of varieties of coffee grow in Ethiopia) grown by smallholder farmers and collected at a processing station in the region. Altitude in this area can be anywhere from 1000-2000masl. PT’s calls this roast level “light-medium” and gives us tasting notes of “strawberry, blackberry, fig.”
I am using my usual pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of water in a notNeutral Gino dripper. I always brew with Third Wave Water and my Handground grinder was set to “3” for this cup. In the bag, the fragrance on the whole beans (see, Jeff, you can teach an old dogs new tricks!) is redolent with berries and dark fruits and this coffee bloomed beautifully in the Gino, looking like a big, dark ice cream scoop in a bowl! As much as I’d love to say it doesn’t matter, that’d be a lie. What you see greatly informs your brain and helps what you taste and, if a coffee is gorgeous to look at when you’re brewing it, that’s not a bad thing.
In the cup this is a medium-heavy bodied coffee and right off the bat I can tell this is a little different from a “classic” Ethiopian natural and has a lot of complexity going on, which I can already tell I’m going to like. There’s some berry jam in the aroma from the cup. With the sip there’s a little bit of fruity acidity right up front with a hint of lemon-lime hitting my tongue first. Right behind it is a wave of dense sweetness and the strawberries and blackberries PT’s calls out on the label. Both of these berry flavors lean a little darker and sweeter and conjure images of berry jam rather than the fresh, brighter fruit, for me. In the second half of the sip there is a dark fruit component that I like “fig” as a descriptor for. I definitely get a figgy fruit sweetness in the finish and aftertaste in this cup. Second half of the sip also has some nice bitterness to it to temper the sweet and fruit. I think that’s coming from the roast level, mostly, but I don’t get any actual roasty notes in this cup. If I agitate the coffee and puff breaths out my nose (retronasal tasting), I get a lot of nice floral notes and it kicks up and clarifies that lemon-lime acidity, too. Now that I’m putting some longer time between sips there is a hint of roast in the far aftertaste and an unmistakeable watermelon note in the aftertaste for me, too. It took about a minute or longer for those to show up between sips.
This is a killer coffee. Yeah, I’m biased, but I’m biased because I’ve seen the level of care and detail Maritza and the crew put into test roasting, cupping, comparing notes etc before they start production. And they continue that through every batch to maintain consistent quality. They’re really all-in with this, this is not a casual endeavor for the PT’s gang and that means a lot to us coffee consumers. I’ll definitely be ripping some espresso shots with this and I have a feeling it’ll work great for that, so keep your eyes peeled on my Instagram for updates and “espresso porn.” LOL Fantastic job for everyone involved with this coffee and thanks to MyCoffeePub for selecting interesting and delicious coffees every month!
