Good morning and welcome to today’s review where I check out Per’La Specialty Coffee’s Espresso Fino blend. You know me and espresso, so without further ado, let’s dive right in!
Purchase this coffee for $16/12oz
PER’LA SPECIALTY ROASTERS ESPRESSO FINO
I was on my never-ending quest of coffee to review recently and Paul Massard, co-founder of Per’La Specialty Roasters reached out to send me a couple things. I know the Per’La name is a mainstay in Florida’s specialty coffee culture and superfriend, Andy Giambarba (formerly of the Nowbrewing.coffee website which is unfortunately defunct), sent me a Kenyan they roasted back in 2016 that I loved, so I was stoked. What I didn’t know, even from writing about Per’La before, is that Paul spent 5 years at The Roasterie in Kansas City as green coffee buyer, production manager/roaster and quality assurance manager! What a small world! Paul’s CV also features things like having a degree in international finance and an executive MBA and after his stint at The Roasterie he was director of supply chain at Honolulu Coffee Company. Paul is a Q Grader, which is a program that trains people to evaluate coffee, score it and identify defects and the training is intense. There are fewer than 400 Q Graders in the USA. Per’La’s other co-founder is Chris Nolte, whose business experience is vast with a background in development, branding and marketing from a wide variety of industries. Together, Chris and Paul founded Per’La Specialty Coffee in Miami, Florida in 2015. Since then, they’ve snagged prestigious accounts in Miami’s culinary scene and they’ve opened House of Per’La, a culinary-driven coffee shop.
Paul kindly sent me a kilo of their Espresso Fino, a traditional-leaning espresso that Paul told me is designed to play well with milk. I’m not much of a dairy guy these days, so I microfoam milk probably less than 5 times per year! What I’m saying is I did try this coffee out in a variety of sizes of milk drinks, but my camera didn’t come out a single time to capture any of my pathetic attempts at “latte art!” I’ll leave that to the professionals who steam more milk in the first five minutes of a slow morning shift than I do in a year!
Espresso Fino is a blend of washed coffees from South America, Central America and Indonesia. Per’La considers this to be a “dark” roast and it is is well-developed and grinds pretty easily in my manual grinder, but it’s not super-dark like a French or Italian roast. There are a few hints of oils breaking through the surface on the beans but this is not a nuked, burned coffee by any stretch. Varieties include Bourbon, Caturra and Mundo Novo. Per’La’s website says, “Our Espresso Fino blend was created for those coffee lovers looking for an espresso blend with a familiar espresso flavor but without the char and bitterness commonly found in traditional “Italian Roasted” espresso. The Fino is lower on the acidity level in comparison to our standard espresso blend.” They give us tasting notes of, “dark chocolate, roasted nuts, raspberry.”
I’ve been drinking the coffee a variety of ways over the last couple weeks: straight espresso shots, small cappuccino, flat white, macchiato (the traditional Italian kind), cortado/Gibraltar and they’ve all been enjoyable even with my suspect milk skills. A word on my equipment because it is important when it comes to espresso… I’m using a Gaggia Classic that I have blind-tuned to about 9 bars of pressure. I’ve replaced the steam wand with a Rancilio Silvia wand, the stock aluminum screen holder has been replaced with brass and I also traded the stock Gaggia screen for a precision IMS one. I use a Decent Espresso precision 20g basket and matched 58.5mm precision tamper calibrated to 25lbs of pressure when tamping. Grinder is an Orphan Espresso Pharos 2.0. I give the grounds a WDT stir to distribute, tamp and pull, nothing terribly fussy or fancy.
As straight espresso, I really enjoyed shots that were coming in with a recipe of about 19g of espresso in the basket, 37-39g out in 27-30 seconds. This “normale” 1:2 ratio is a ballpark recipe for starting with most espressos and it proved to give nice results for Espresso Fino. As a straight shot, this produced a cup with good body and a substantial mouthfeel. My favorite shot of the dozens I made over the past weeks had a lot of semisweet chocolate and roasted nuts in the neigborhood of almonds and pecans, but not one or the other or a nut flavor I could specify. This shot had just a hint of roasty notes and as the espresso cooled I was getting some cherry out of it. The finish had a fair amount of bitterness (the good kind I want from coffee) and the finish and aftertaste had me thinking of a big, heavy IPA loaded with hops. I don’t know that I’ve ever put together hops bitterness with what I get from coffee, but this will definitely be on my mind as I drink espresso in the future. I really enjoyed this coffee as a straight shot and true to Per’La’s description, it does lean toward traditional without any char or burned notes, or that astringent bitterness that comes from over-roasted beans. There are minimal fruit notes in the shot, for my palate, so people who don’t like as much acidity and fruitiness or brightness in their espresso would love Espresso Fino.
As you can imagine, an espresso like this plays great with milk. I didn’t make any 22oz lattes or anything. My cups allow for a 6oz flat white/capp as the max capacity. With milk, the chocolate notes and nuttiness of this coffee expresses nicely. Because of the low fruitiness, I didn’t get any flavors that had me wondering if the milk had gone sour (very fruit forward espressos can do this). Espresso Fino is a nice, easy, relaxed base for building milk drinks whether they’re a tiny macchiato with a dollop of foam or a bigger capp or flat white. My favorite was a cortado-sized drink, but that tends to be my go-to when trying out how a shop’s espresso works with milk anyway as it’s like a mini-latte and I don’t have to worry about too much dairy in my system. The slight hoopy bitterness of the espresso counters the sweetness of the milk perfectly and creates a beautifully balanced drink. I did try a small cappuccino with a single shot (I split the output into basically a mini-cortado made in a 2.5oz espresso cup and a 6oz capp cup) and that was too washed out. I still drank the whole thing, don’t get me wrong, but it needed more coffee to cut through that much milk. I don’t think you could really screw up a milky with this coffee in a coffee shop or at home unless you just really mess up the proportions like I did on this drink.
Per’La’s Espresso Fino lives up to its design. It’s fantastic as a straight shot and works well with most reasonable sizes of milkies, just like they set out to do. It has great body and a silky mouthfeel and is a traditional-leaning Italian espresso experience without any of the things about the Italian espresso experience that make it less than appealing! Perfetto! Now, if only we could convince the city of Rome to adopt Per’La as their espresso supplier…