Good morning and welcome to today’s review. I have a gigantic bean for you this morning, a Pacamara from Daysol Coffee Lab, and it’s a honey process coffee to boot! Let’s dive right in…
Purchase this coffee directly for $15/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Costa Rica La Trinidad | Ethiopia Tega & Tula
DAYSOL COFFEE LAB EL SALVADOR PACAMARA HONEY PROCESS
Daysol Coffee Lab is a Birmingham, Alabama based roasting operation formed in 2019 by Peter Solis and Bert Davis. To explain their name a little more, I pulled this from their website:
Daysol Coffee Lab co-owner Peter Solis make up half of the meaning behind our name (the Sol). The other half is driven by what Peter speaks of: Head Roaster Bert Davis’ passion for roasting remarkable coffee (the Da). The Y is what brought their two journeys together to form Daysol Coffee Lab.
We’ve had coffee from Bert on KC Coffee Geek before. Prior to moving to Birmingham with his family last year, Bert was roasting in Colorado under the name Ki Roasters. I’ve greatly enjoyed the Ethiopian and Costa Rican coffees I’ve had from Daysol thus far, both washed coffees, so I am looking forward to a different process.
This morning’s coffee is a Pacamara varietal, which is a hybrid of the Pacas and Maragogype varieties. Pacamara beans are huge, almost comically so, when compared to most other Arabica coffee varietals. This coffee is grown by Jorge Alberto Recinos on a three manzana (a little over 5 acres) farm in the Chalatenango department of north central El Salvador called Buena Fe. Coffee grows around 1450masl there. Honey process coffees have nothing to do with bee honey. Coffe is a fruit and the seeds inside the coffee cherries are what we call coffee beans. You have to process the fruit to get to the seeds, and honey process coffees are sorted and depulped in a machine to break the cherry skins and remove some of the goopy, sticky mucilage inside them (often called “honey”). The seeds are laid out on raised beds, with some of this mucilage still clinging to them, and they are like little sponges, so they soak up some of the sugars and other flavor-responsible compounds from the mucilage as they dry out. Honey coffees tend to be fruitier and bigger bodied than their fully washed cousins, which are dried without any mucilage, but cleaner than their “natural” counterparts, which are dried with the cherries whole and unbroken like big raisins.
Daysol Coffee lab gives us tasting notes of, “Caramel, berry and lemon with a praline aftertaste” for this coffee.
I’m using my standard pourover setup this morning of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with a Kalita 155 filter. I’m using a Knock Aergrind for grinding duties and pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimze agitation of the bed during brewing. Including a 30 second bloom, this coffee took 4:00 to brew.
The aroma isn’t doing a lot for me, I’m mainly getting raisin-like notes from it and maybe some citrus. Taking a sip, this is a medium-bodied coffee with a lot of sweetness and fruitiness right up front. There is a light caramel sweetness that runs the full course of this coffee from start to finish and anchors it on the low end. There is a lot of citrus in this cup, including some lemon peel notes, hints of pink grapefruit and a bit of orange. The citrus adds a lot of brightness and a nice ceiling for this coffee, but it’s not harsh or zippy at all. These citrus tones are soft and round and bright but also sweet, providing both a nice counterpoint and accompaniment to the caramel sweetness in the cup. If I hold the coffee in my mouth and agitate some before swallowing, I get more citrus juiciness, a sense of feeling that attacks the sides of my tongue and cheeks, from it, with more pronounced lemon and grapefruit. In the second half of the sip and more so in the finish, I am picking up a bit of fresh strawberry in the flavor, and a note that reminds me of strawberry jam persists in the aftertaste, too. The first handful of sips I was getting a nutty note, maybe pecan, in the finish and a flash in the aftertaste, but my palate seems to have attenuated to that fairly quickly and I’m not getting that flavor now. This is another awesome coffee from Daysol Coffee Lab and at $15, this coffee is a steal as honeys and Pacamaras tend to come with some premium up-charges in my experience. Don’t pass this one up!