Good morning and welcome to today’s review. I’m tasting Perkatory Coffee Roasters’ Sinister Shop Blend this morning. Happy Friday, if the days even mean anything to you anymore!
Purchase this coffee directly for $18/16oz
Other reviews in this series: Guatemala Antigua | Colombia Finca Los Pinos | Ethiopia Yirgacheffe
PERKATORY COFFEE ROASTERS SINISTER SHOP BLEND
Perkatory Coffee Roasters was started by Joey and Johanna Perazella in Middletown, Connecticut in late 2018 and they already have a second location planned in Southington, CT. 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 like the ’80’s skate-inspired vibe of Perkatory’s labels and the fact that they seem to be having a lot of fun with something that can be taken way over-seriously in coffee!
This morning’s coffee is Perkatory’s Sinister Shop Blend. This is a “light-medium roast” blend of their Finca Los Pinos from Nariño, Colombia (see the link to that review above) and a Direct Trade Brazil Oberon. Perkatory’s Oberon is a natural process coffee grown in the 800-1300masl range. I’m not 100% sure this is the same grower, but my research found an Oberon blend from InterAmerican Coffee that is grown in Cerrado, in southwest Minas Gerais. Coffee has an easy life there, the weather is predictable and coffee farms are large and high-tech. As a single origin, Perkatory says this Brazilian coffee has, “chocolate, molasses, and tobacco with a fruity finish” while they describe the Colombian component as “fruity, lemongrass aroma, sweet chamomile flavor, honey finish.” Perkatory describes the Sinister Shop Blend as, “very nostalgic of that Saturday morning cup of coffee. Very smooth, slightly nutty, and bold with hints of chocolate and fruit.”
I’m using my standard pourover setup 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. My grinder for pourovers is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the brew time total was 3:45.
In the aroma from the cup I’m getting some caramelized sugars and some earthy notes. Taking a sip, this is everything Perkatory described… Lots of sweetness up front. I’m getting dark caramel notes and some molasses flavors in the low end of this coffee with a hint of cigar tobacco interwoven. In the mid-sip I’m picking up a raisin-like note that adds more to the sweetness of this cup, too. There may be a little malic acidity here reminding me of apples, but most of the fruit notes, for me, are raisin, dates… dried dark fruits. Although now that I just wrote that I am getting a stronger red apple sweetness and flavor out of this cup. Did I mention this coffee is sweet yet? LOL The cup finishes, you guessed it, sweet and there are some nutty tones in the finish and aftertaste. Nothing I can specify, but I get a roasted nut vibe here. The aftertaste has some cocoa, a lot of that dark dried fruit and a healthy toboacco note, too.
This is a lovely coffee! It’s everything I like in a blend… easy drinking, sweet, inviting, lots of familiar flavors, enough complexity for me to appreciate and write about but also roasted in a way that if you didn’t care about all this bean-sniffing stuff you would just have a great cup of coffee to enjoy! I don’t drink much dairy, but this is a coffee that I think would take cream well. Sugar would be a no-brainer, but this is already a super-sweet coffee for me, so it wouldn’t be my choice, but I know there are people who use coffee as a vehicle for their other, true, addiction! Shop blends are designed to be easy drinking, palatable, crowd-pleasing coffees that are consistent morning to morning and Perkatory’s Sinister Blend checks every one of those boxes. This may be my favorite of the four coffees they sent me, although I enjoyed each of them in their own merit. There’s something about this blend that is just hitting exactly right this morning. I love it!