Good morning and welcome to today’s review! I’m getting a taste of Africa via my friends in Flordia at Per’La Specialty Roasters this morning, so without further ado…
PER’LA SPECIALTY ROASTERS ETHIOPIA SHAKISO
Paul Massard, co-founder of Per’La Specialty Roasters in Miami, Florida, sent me a couple of 1-kilo bags of coffee recently! I loved the Espresso Fino I reviewed a few weeks ago, and I’ve been itching to write about this natural Ethiopian selection, too! 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.
Unfortunately for us, it looks like this coffee is sold out or at least not on offer currently, replaced by a washed Ethiopian from Sidama. Darn it! My travel schedule over the last month has been a killer for getting reviews posted. Nonetheless, this morning’s coffee is a natural from Shakiso, which is in the Guji region of Ethiopia. This is a mix of local varieties grown in the 1900-2200masl range and Per’La considers this to be a light roast. They give us tasting notes of, “Blueberry, strawberry, cacao” and usually their website is full of info on each coffee, but I couldn’t get Google to find a cached page for this coffee, so this is the info we get for this one!
If you just stumbled into this part of the coffee world and don’t know what “natural” means in the context of coffee, it’s how the coffee is processed in this case. Coffee is a fruit, about the size of a standard cherry, and as such, the fruits are referred to as “coffee cherries.” Inside those cherries are (usually) two seeds and these seeds are what will eventually be separated from the rest of the fruit and roasted as coffee “beans.” Natural coffee are picked and sorted, then dried on raised mesh beds with the cherries intact, like big raisins. As the fruit dries and breaks down the fermentation process happening inside the cherries impart fruity flavors, sweetness and body to the seeds, which soak it up like little sponges. Ethiopian naturals tend to have a lot of berry flavors.
This is a really dense coffee with a light roast, so I had a bit of trouble getting my usual brew times with this one without making the grind too coarse, so I settled into a brew time of about 5 minutes, which is at least 1.5 minutes what I usually do with the same grind settings and setup on most coffees. Nonetheless, it works great for this coffee, and lightly roasted, hard beans often to OK with longer brew times because it’s harder for the water to do it’s job than on darker or softer coffees. In any case, I’m using a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to control agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and a 5:00 total brew time.
On the nose I’m getting some berry notes typical of Ethiopian naturals, as well as some peachy notes, which I rarely get in the aroma from coffees, so I hope that means I will find peach in the flavor, too, as I’m a sucker for peach, apricot, “stone fruits” in coffee. This is a coffee well worth letting cool down (well, they all are, really) before drinking. Taking a sip, this is a medium bodied coffee. I’m getting some honey-like sweetness from this coffee with lots of strawberry notes and I’m definitely finding peach in here, especially in a cool cup (I’d call it “lukewarm” right now). The strawberry note is a bit “perfumed” and so there must be some florals coming through with that flavor, for my palate. The peach hits in the mid-sip and into the second half of the sip and rides through the finish and into the aftertaste, too. For a natural, this coffee has almost no ferment flavors, which I personally love and the funkier the better, but to some people taste “garbagey” or “rotten” and turns them off from natural process coffees. This one is pretty minimal in that department. This is nicely balanced coffee and a really easy drinker. It’s finishing a tad dry on my palate but leaves a really nice aftertaste, mostly peach with a bit of strawberry lingering.
This is a great coffee! I’m sad I didn’t get my review posted before it was gone, but Per’La has a bunch of coffees on offer right now that all look great, and if this natural was this good I’d be willing to get the washed Sidama would be a good sub for this!