Good morning and welcome to today’s review. I’m taking a taste of Perkatory Coffee Roasters’ current Ethiopian selection and thanks to sheltering-in-place, there’s a good chance you have absolutely nothing on your agenda today but to read this, so buckle up and let’s slurp some coffee!
Purchase this coffee directly for $18/16oz
Other reviews in this series: Guatemala Antigua
PERKATORY COFFEE ROASTERS ETHIOPIA YIRGACHEFFE
My last post of a Perkatory coffee was March 9, and at least here in the USA, the world was totally different, wasn’t it? Funny how fast things change and how quickly we adapt. Anyway, this isn’t the Covid-19 Diaries, it’s a coffee review! 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, or it may be soon-to-be-open. 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 is Perkatory’s Ethiopia Yirgacheffe. This is a washed coffee from the birthplace of coffee where growing altitudes are around 1900-2000masl. Yirgacheffe is widely considered to be the origin/birthplace of the Arabica plant. Ethiopia is probably best known for its natural coffees, which are picked and then dried slowly in the sun on raised mesh beds. The coffee cherries, which are about the size of a regular cherry and contain two seeds that we call coffee “beans,” dry and shrivel up and break down like big raisins. Ethiopian naturals tend to have a lot of fruit flavors, especially berries. Washed coffees, like this one from Perkatory, are a totally different process. The coffee cherries are run through a machine that squishes them and ruptures the skins of the fruit and removes some of the pulp inside, then the goopy, sticky mess is moved to fermentation tanks where the microbes in the water finishes the job of cleaning the mucilage off the beans. Finally, these are removed from the water, rinsed a bunch and laid out to dry slowly. Washed coffees tend to be “cleaner” tasting and when it comes to Ethiopian washed coffees, especially from around Yirgacheffe, they tend to be light and very tea-like in their flavors and mouthfeel.
Perkatory tells us this coffee has a “Light to medium body with a fruity, light and floral aroma. Bright, sweet citrus beginning with a clean, dry, tea-like finish. Hints of peach sweetness and grapefruit acidity.”
OK! I’m looking forward to it! I’m using my standard 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 with Kalita 155 filter. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the brew bed during brewing. I did a 30 second bloom on this coffee and the total brew time including the bloom came in at 3:15.
I wasn’t getting much other than roasty notes in the aroma, but once the coffee started cooling it really opened up. I got hit with something that reminds me of my grandmother’s cheesecake, which is the true power of coffee, really. That was one of my favorite things as a kid, but I haven’t tasted it in 20+ years, yet when the right combination of aromas hit me it took me back to being a kid again and connecting with my grandmother! Anyway, her recipe had a fair amount of lime in it, and that graham cracker crust, and the aroma of this Perkatory Ethiopian has a bit of both at times. There’s a hint of florals in there, too. Taking a sip, this is a medium bodied coffee with a creamy, dairy-like mouthfeel. It’s a little slick on my palate like dairy and Perkatory took this roast level into, at least visually, what I would consider to be “medium” roast territory, so there is some nice sugar development that adds body. Washed Yirgacheffes can be quite light and very tea-like, so a little extra body from a slightly more developed roast goes a long way on a dreary, cold morning like today here in Kansas City!
Up front I’m getting some more of that graham cracker and baked sweet bread note I had in the aroma, with some honey-like sweetness also anchoring the low end of this cup. Some roastiness is hanging around in the flavor and giving me a slightly woody vibe, like a real cedar pencil (Musgrave Tennessee Reds are my favorites right now, but if you are picky about the graphite core being centered you won’t like that pencil… and, yes, I am “that guy” with pretty much everything LOL), but this is pretty slight and it’s like an undertone that is sitting in the way back of my throat and in my sinus. It’s a hint of that smell you get when you sharpen a real woodcased pencil. Anyway, There is a nice peachy sweetness here, too, and if I hold the coffee in my mouth and push some air in puffs out of my nose, I get a really nice peach-infused tea flavor/aroma that is great. I’m getting a bit of floral from this Yirg, too, and a little bit of lemon candy acidity. I mentioned peach tea, but I wouldn’t call this a super tea-like Yirgacheffe compared to some I’ve had. The sip ends sweet, but during the aftertaste my tongue gets this dry, rough feeling to it and that’s where the tea character really comes into this coffee for me. I suppose that “astringency” is a flaw, but I don’t think I’ve ever had a washed Ethiopian coffee that didn’t have a little to a lot of that drying effect on my palate between sips, and it really does just feel like it does when I drink tea, so I don’t see it, personally, as a flaw. It doesn’t take away from anything, add a weird flavor note, etc, so it’s just something I fully expect from washed Ethiopian coffees and is no big deal. This is a nicely balanced, sweet cup, not super complex for me, but very easy drinking and enjoyable. EXACTLY what I wanted this morning and this coffee checked all my boxes! Woot!