March’s MyCoffeePub subscription dropped last week and it’s another fresh, seasonal offering from the excellent Sunergos Coffee in Louisville, Kentucky. Let’s drink!
Purchase this coffee directly for $9.50/8oz, or $17.50/16oz
MYCOFFEEPUB MARCH 2019: SUNERGOS COFFEE PERU CAJAMARCA
MyCoffeePub is a great subscription and a highlight of every month for me. Once a month, a pacakage arrives from MyCoffeePub and you don’t know what is inside until you open it up. I love the surprise! I’ve been partnering with MyCoffeePub (and even got to select one month’s coffee a couple years ago!) for several years and have yet to have gotten a coffee I haven’t loved, so if you’re nervous about the selections, don’t be. Even better, a fair number of the coffees are ones that I wouldn’t have picked for myself because of my weird inherent biases, and so it’s great to be led to some of these coffees that I normally wouldn’t pick for myself and find I really love them.
This month’s coffee is a little like that. Sunergos Coffee has provided March’s MyCoffeePub subscribers with their Peru Cajamarca. Peruvian coffee is a lot like Brazilian for me… I usually pass it up for something that seems like it’ll be more exciting if I’m given the choice, but just like Brazilian coffees, I end up always loving Peruvians that I actually drink! It’s just a weird thing I do, I’m sure other people who drink a huge variety of coffee every year do the same. So, I was excited to see this month’s coffee was something that if I was at Sunergos I would’ve passed up on the shelf, for no other reason than bias. I feel bad for Peru because it’s not like I’ve ever even tasted a bad coffee from there! I’ll start therapy for this next week. Let’s talk coffee now…
One of the things I love about Sunergos is the amount of information on their website and another thing I’m a big fan of is that they offer every coffee as either an 8-oz or 16-oz package, so it’s perfectly reasonable to hit their site and buy 3-4 8 oz bags and know you’ll use it all in a timely fashion and you get to try twice as many coffees for the same amount of $$. Very, very nice. This coffee is a mix of Caturra, Typica, Catimor, Mundo Novo and Pache varietals that grow around the small town of Jaén in the Cajamarca region of northern Peru. Coffee grows at 1650-1800masl there and this is a washed coffee with a “medium” (city level if you are familiar with that roasting system) level. Sunergos’s complete tasting notes promise hazelnut, cocoa, cereal and brown sugar aromas and flavors of, “Cocoa, floral, grapefruit, brown sugar.”
I’m using my normal pourover setup for this coffee, which is a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper using a Kalita 155 filter. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I’m using a Melodrip to control my pours, using a pulse pour method. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and was done brewing in a total of just over 3:00.
Getting a good smell of this coffee in the cup I am getting some hazelnut and hints of jasmine. Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium-heavy bodied coffee for me. The first wash of flavors is simultaneously on the bright side of the spectrum but also coming in right alongside a big wave of sweetness and sugary notes. Let’s look at those first. This is a sweet, sweet cup. In that sweet base I am getting brown sugar, medium to dark caramel and some cocoa or maybe even milk chocolate. It’s so good, I wish you could upload into my palate right now and experience what I am! On the brighter side of the flavors, I’m getting some crisp green apple, apple juice, some lighter notes of citrus and some more of that jasmine I smelled in the aroma. I don’t know that I would pick out grapefruit in this coffee, but there is definitely a citrusy component. It’s less apparent than the apple notes, that I find very commonly in Peruvian coffee, but it’s certainly there. I am just having trouble deciding what type of citrus note it is and hanging my hat on that. The end of the sip is a little nutty and in the first few sips I was getting definite hazelnut, which is a flavor I love but my palate attenuated quickly to that and the nuttiness is still there, but I don’t get as much hazelnut specifically in subsequent sips of this coffee. It’s really a chocolate-with-nuts vibe in the finish and it’s great. There’s the slightest hint of raisin in the finish for me, too. This coffee finishes out sweet and there’s a super long aftertaste with apple notes, cocoa, nuts.
This coffee is killer! I am really, really enjoying this cup and it makes me even more grateful that I get MyCoffeePub every month as I guarantee, had I been standing in Louisville in front of a wall of coffee at Sunergos, I just never would have reached for this bag, so I am really happy my subscription led me to such a great experience with this Cajamarca from Sunergos. This is an insta-buy, and I’d go for the full pound and then throw some 8 ouncers in to make shipping worth it, too. In fact, let me build out your cart for you, LOL… I’d get the Cajamarca for sure, the description on the Tanzania Peaberry Kilimanjaro is too good to pass up so I’d be putting 8 oz of that in my cart FOR SURE, and I’d end up with both the Burundi Kayanza Kabingo and Ethiopia Wolichu Wachu.