Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a new roaster out of Houston, Texas, Pirate Island Coffee! Let’s check out their organic Nicaraguan offering…
Purchase this coffee directly for $10/12oz
Pirate Island Coffee Instagram
PIRATE ISLAND COFFEE NICARAGUA
Pirate Island Coffee is a brand new roastery, born out of the “opportunities” that the Covid-19 pandemic has created for so many people. It’s a woman-owned business, with Mindy Gilbert at the helm, supported by her husband, Eli, and two children ages 5 and 7 who have taken a real, active role in the company, too. Mindy saw the opportunity for Pirate Island Coffee to bring the family together and teach the kids real lessons about entrepreneurship, to the point that her daughter named the company and both kids have been involved in everything from sourcing green coffee to marketing and design, which I think is super cool! Eli started in the coffee biz back in the halcyon days of 1992’s “second wave” of specialty coffee, working at Java City in Sacramento and Cafe Moto in San Diego. It has been a few years since I have visited Houston, but for the size of that city, I would say the specialty coffee scene is really just getting started there, so the market leans heavily toward the more traditional American coffee drinker. To this end, Mindy and gang focus on medium and dark roasts (although this Nicaraguan is bright and full of origin character) and are even experimenting with some flavored coffees as this is what the Houston market currently favors. This is a smart business move and Pirate Island can still source good coffees and provide the flavor profiles that their customers prefer at the same time… the two things aren’t mutually exclusive. There is an art to darker roasting, too, without just charring the beans, so I am excited to try the French Roast they sent in another review soon.
This morning’s coffee is Pirate Island’s Organic Nicaragua Microlot. There isn’t a lot of coffee nerd info on their website, which I would appreciate seeing (and I know I am a minority in this regard), but Mindy sent me additional info with this care package from Houston. This is an organic and Fair Trade coffee from Aldea Global (Asociación Aldea Global Jinotega), a coffee growing association with about 47% of the 500 members being women. Doing some of my own research, the El Diamante microlot is a mix of Bourbon, Catuai and Caturra varieties grown around Olomega, Jinotega, Nicaragua, which features some of the highest altitudes in the country with coffee growing at 1000-1400masl. This is a washed coffee and the extra altitude should create some nice complexity. Pirate Island gives us tasting notes of, “Citrus, grapefruit, cherries” for this coffee.
I’m using my standard pourover method 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 a Kalita 155 filter. I use a Knock Aergrind for my pourovers and this coffee got a 30 second bloom and had a total brew time, including the bloom, of 3:30.
The aroma from the cup has some citrus, maybe lime, for me, and a bit of a floral note I didn’t expect, but it didn’t come out until the coffee was cooling to the drinking temperature I like to start at, which is around 110F. Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium+ bodied coffee that is sweet and fruit-forward out of the gate. I was expecting more chocolatey/nutty and less fruity, so this is a pleasant surprise for me. There is actually a nice single-origin dark chocolate sweetness to the base of this cup, which I really enjoy, and works well with the fruits here. I’m getting a lot of cherry notes from this coffee, and it’s an interesting mix of both tart cherry and that super sugary canned cherry pie filling (but in a good way!). This works really well with the chocolate notes here. There is a nice citrus acidity to this coffee and I’m having trouble, at the moment, pinning down specific citrus flavors, which is a bit unusual for me. Generally my palate is pretty decent on the citrus notes, but this coffee is throwing me for a bit of a loop… there’s a hint of grapefruit, but it’s subtle. I’m also getting some lime notes here but, for me, lime is usually accompanied by a distinct bitterness and I’m not really getting that in this coffee, at least at the current temperature. There’s definitely some sweet lemon or lemon candy that hits the front of my tongue with each sip. As the cup continues to cool, the chcolate notes seem to be getting more subtle and the citrus is ramping up more. Overall, this is a nicely balanced cup between sweetness and brightness, and all those fruit notes have a candy-like quality, but that being said, this is a citrus-forward coffee that really highlights the acids in the cup (acidity in coffee = good… it’s not the stomach burning variety I’m talking about). This coffee finishes a tad dry and leaves a slightly dry feeling on my tongue in the aftertaste, which has a lot of lemon lingering on my palate, as well as some of that dark chocolate and cherry combo.
I am really enjoying this coffee. It’s sweet and bright and fruit-forward without being harsh or out of balance. I did actually drink a fair amount of this coffee as espresso and it worked well there, bringing out the citrus and cherry notes. Unfortunately, I wasn’t keeping tasting notes with those shots and since then I’ve run into a temporary, no-big-deal health issue that dictates that I limit caffeine as much as possible, so I can’t go back to the espresso machine and revisit this coffee for more specific notes at this time. It was a well-behaved coffee and enjoyable as ‘spro, I can say that much! At $10/12oz this coffee is the best deal I have seen on specialty beans in a LONG time. Don’t let the price fool you, this coffee makes a legit good cup and you may as well spring the $50 for 5lbs and freeze a bunch to make it your daily drinker for a while!