Good morning and welcome to today’s review. This morning I am putting another new state on the KC Coffee Geek map with Connecticut! We have Perkatory Coffee Roasters for the first time on the site, so let’s dive right in!
Purchase this coffee for $18/16oz
PERKATORY COFFEE ROASTERS GUATEMALA
A new week, a new state! We’re putting Connecticut on the map this morning with Perkatory Coffee Roasters! Perkatory was started by Joey and Johanna Perazella in Middletown, Connecticut in late 2018. It looks like they’ve grown into a second location already, in Southington. Both cities are around 20-30 minutes south of Hartford, CT. Joey and Johanna grew up on punk rock and skateboarding, and they wanted to take the culture of craft brewing into coffee. Mixing all that with their mutual love of Halloween, the natural offspring is Perkatory, a play on words for heaven’s waiting room whose mascot is a grim reaper drinking coffee and wearing sunglasses while giving the “hang loose” sign. I dig what Joey and Johanna are doing… coffee can be so serious sometimes that it’s nice to see someone having some fun with the imagery and still taking the coffee itself “deathly serious.” 🙂
This morning’s coffee from Perkatory is their Guatemala. Their site doesn’t have a ton of info about each coffee, but I can see this is a washed coffee from Antigua that grows around 1370-1830masl. Perkatory calls it a medium roast and says this coffee is, “a full bodied, brightly acidic coffee with smokey and spicy notes due to the volcanic soil that it is grown in.” I’m using my standard pourover setup for this coffee of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize the agitation of the coffee bed. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and ended up having a relatively fast total brew time of 2:35.
I’m a little stuffed up this morning, so not a ton of aroma is breaking through the barrier, but I am getting some classic “coffee” aroma, caramel and some molasses. Taking a sip, this is a medium bodied coffee, for me, and I’m getting a lot of sweetness, some roast notes, and lots of apple notes. On the low end, I’m getting a syrupy, caramel sweetness. Despite Perkatory’s description that this is a “brightly acidic coffee,” I’m not finding that, although there is a lot of apple flavor and apple juice sweetness here, which comes from malic acid, the same acid found in apples, pears and other fruits. Malic acidity always reads more “cool” and “round” to me than an edgier acidity, like citrus, for example. In addition to a decent amount of green apple flavor notes and red apple juice I’m getting something that reminds me of watermelon from this coffee. My nose is a little off this morning from being stuffed up, and that affects flavor a lot, but as far as I can tell my brain is telling me there is some watermelon here. My first few sips had quite a bit of roast notes, but I attenuated pretty quickly to that and I’m really getting a nice balance of sweetness and fruitiness from this cup. There may even be a little bit of pecan or a similar nut here. This coffee finishes sweet and a little nutty, and the aftertaste is relatively short lived with more of the apple and watermelon there for me and some of the roast notes I was finding in my first few sips.
This is a nice introduction to Perkatory! The Guatemalan coffee has nice balance and is very easy drinking. It’s not the most complex coffee in the world, which is fine. It’s sweet, inviting, familiar… probably a crowd pleaser if I had to guess and I could see a coffee like this being the base of a lot of blends. I have a few more coffees to try out from my new friends in Connecticut, so stay tuned!