Good morning and welcome to today’s review where I’m checking out another coffee from Pirate Island Coffee in Houston, TX, their organic French Roast. This is a dark roast that is perfect timing for the end of our long summer here in KC!
Purchase this coffee directly for $10/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Nicaragua Organic
PIRATE ISLAND COFFEE ORGANIC FRENCH ROAST
It has been a couple weeks since we last saw Pirate Island Coffee, a new roastery born in Houston, TX as a result of the “opportunities” created by Covid-19 here in the USA. This morning’s coffee is actually the same coffee as the organic Nicaraguan I reviewed then, just a totally different roast profile which creates an entirely different drinking experience. Pirate Island Coffee is 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 an active role in the company from sourcing green coffee to marketing, design and even coming up with the name! Mindy is using Pirate Island Coffee as a lesson in life for the kids, as well as a legit business, and I love the idea of getting kids more involved and learning in a real-world situation. Eli started in the coffee business back in tthe 1990’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 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.
This morning’s coffee is Pirate Island’s French Roast, which is the same organic Nicaraguan coffee I reviewed previously (link at the top of the page), but to a different roast profile. This coffee is sourced from El Diamante Estate in Jinotega, Nicaragua, and the farmers there are part of a collective called Aldea Global, which is comprised of 47% female growers. When I reviewed the medium roast version of this coffee, I got some dark chocolate, grapefruit, lemon candy, some cherry, and I really enjoyed the cup, which was bright, fruit-forward, sweet and very pleasant. Although this is the same raw materials, this French Roast will be a completely different experience from the medium roast version Pirate Island sells.
French Roast is basically the end of the spectrum when roasting coffee, anything past that is pretty much just burned beyond recognition. When roasting coffee, there are two important events that occur called first crack and second crack. These are audible sounds coming from the coffee seeds as they expand and rupture their cell walls. How fast you get to each of these events, what the temperature curve looks like along the way, and many other factors are variables that have a big effect on the final product, so there is an art and a science to coffee roasting that takes a long time to master. In general, coffee needs to make it past first crack to be drinkable. There are some exceptions, but as a rule of thumb, you want to get it into and just past first crack as a good starting point. If you stop the roast during or just after first crack, you have a light roast, or maybe even something called a cinnamon roast, which is super light. The lighter the roast, the more the origin characteristics you’ll be able to get from the flavors, so light roasts tend to be bright, fruit-forward, and emphasize the flavors that come from the acids in the coffee (which are a good thing, like squeezing a little lemon on a dish while cooking to enhance all the other flavors).
If you keep the roast going, you get into the spectrum of “medium roasts” and you start getting more caramelization and development of sugars. These medium roasts may be referred to as “city,” “city+” and “full city” and this is a sweet spot for a lot of coffees because you still get a lot of the origin characteristics to enjoy while ramping up the sweetness, caramel and honey notes, etc. If you keep roasting, you hit second crack, which is a second series of popping sounds and now you’re into dark roast territory. Past second crack you start to get darker colors in the beans and you’ll see oils on the surface of the beans. First you hit “Vienna roast,” then Italian, and French comes last. French Roast beans are black, coated in oil, light in density, big because they’ve puffed up to maximum size, and there is essentially no origin flavor left, it’s all about the sugar development and caramelization.
A good analogy for this is cooking steak. If you get 4 cuts of meat and you perfectly cook them to medium rare, you’ll notice a lot of differences. But, if you grill them to well done, it doesn’t really matter what you started with, you won’t be able to tell much at the end. Where this analogy doesn’t work is that, in my opinion, there are things to still enjoy about dark roasted coffee while a well done steak isn’t terribly appealing.
The average American coffee drinker still favors darker roasts for the most part, and the trend from specialty roasters over the past few years has been to offer more roasts in the medium range and most will offer something in the second crack and beyond range for those dark roast fans. This is smart… give the people what they want! You can make a lot of legitimate arguments about why Americans like dark roasts and why specialty coffee should try to coax them toward the medium-light range, but at the end of the day coffee is a sensory experience and people like what they like, so why not give them a good quality version of what they like such as Pirate Island’s French Roast? This is a Fair Trade, organic coffee that benefits the growers and the Earth, and still appeals to people who like a cup of the black, so what’s the harm? Maybe it will serve as a gateway for these same drinkers to try some of Pirate Island’s lighter fares.
I enjoyed this coffee two ways, as a pourover and as espresso. I used 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. I used a Knock Aergrind and because this is a dark roast and they are more forgiving, in my opinion, to brewing, I didn’t use my Melodrip, which minimizes coffee bed agitation and always gets used for medium and light roasts. I did a 30 second bloom and the brew time, not including the bloom, was a fairly long 4:15, but I got good flavors out of it. I’ll say right now, as KC Coffee Geek, I favor light and medium roasts. Bring on the acids, the bright flavors, all the origin characteristics, etc! But, being a coffee geek doesn’t mean I’m a coffee snob, and I can appreciate dark roasts with the best of you, too, they just aren’t my daily drinker. This French Roast is super dark, has a lot of smoky and roasty characteristics, a nice mouthfeel and a medium+ to heavy- body for me. These are all the characteristics of a good dark roast that I look for and appreciate. For many years, I was like most American coffee drinkers, seeking out the darkest, oiliest, blackest beans I could find, and so I can appreciate a well-done dark roast and Pirate Island’s French Roast is one of those. There just isn’t a lot to talk about beyond darkly caramelized to lightly burned sugar notes, some carbon/char with its associated bitterness, and smokiness. This coffee has a decent amount of bite with the roasty/smoky component that reads a decent bitterness level, but it’s in balance with the overall cup and I think it adds dimension, and I like this type of bitterness, personally. Coffee is inherently bitter, anyway. It has a sweet finish, a lot of presence in the aftertaste, and it’s just a good ol’ dark roast, what more can I say?
I usually don’t have dairy in the house but I’ve been on a keto ice cream kick, so I did drink a little bit of this with some heavy cream and THIS is the true reason, above all else, that I think Americans like dark roasts. Let’s be honest, the average American is rarely drinking these dark, dark French Roasts black. I do, and that’s what I like, but I’m a weirdo. Most people are adding cream, often flavored syrups and sugar. Look at Starbucks… some of those concoctions are coffee in name only, and their very dark roasts are great vehicles for cream and sugar. A spoonful of heavy cream transforms this coffee into a sweet, dessert-like confection. It erases most of the smokiness and all but demolishes that roasty bite, so it’s just smooth, caramelly and sweet for days. It’s undeniable that if you like adding sugar or dairy to coffee, dark roasts are where it’s at. Coffees like this are magical if you make something like a Cuban cafecito, which will give you diabetes instantly, but is so, SOOOOO good!
I can’t see a dark roast like this without pulling some shots, and this makes a nice traditional espresso. I was using about 17-18g, which for a coffee of this roast level, is almost too much coffee for my IMS 16/22 basket. The same coffee roasted light needs 2-3g more coffee for the same size basket because of the difference in density. This coffee pulls a nice shot, with a good-looking, shaving cream like crema. Flavors are what you would expect, dark, roasty, intense, but pretty sweet and balanced, too. I lived in Rome from 1987-1993 and dark coffees like this give a Roman street espresso vibe to me, except they are a bit sweeter and more balanced because most Italian espresso still has robusta species coffee in the blend, which creates crema like you wouldn’t believe, but has a very distinctive bitterness, too, which this coffee is lacking.
Overall, I enjoyed this coffee. It checks all the boxes for me that I look for in a dark roast. I may only reach for dark beans on occasion, but when I do I, of course, want a high quality roast and good coffee as the raw material, and Pirate Island accomplishes both. The fact that this is an organic, Fair Trade coffee from a co-op that is almost 50% women AND is only $10/bag is astounding, so it’s pretty much an instabuy if you are a dark coffee drinker. Get some!