Good morning and welcome to today’s review! I’m checking out Pirate Island Coffee’s Honduras La Campa Reserva, a medium roast from my friends in Houston, TX. Let’s drink!
Purchase this coffee for $10/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Nicaragua Organic | French Roast
PIRATE ISLAND COFFEE HONDURAS LA CAMPA RESERVA
Pirate Island Coffee is a new roastery based in Houston, Texas that was 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 also have real, active roles in the company. Mindy saw the opportunity for Pirate Island Coffee to bring the family together and teach her kids practical 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! Since my previous reviews I’m seeing more coffee geek info appearing in the descriptions on the Pirate Island website and that makes me happy to see.
This selection from Pirate Island is their Honduras La Campa Reserva. This coffee was grown by seven producers who are part of the specialty coffee division of the green coffee supplier that Pirate Island sourced this coffee from. This group consists of 210 coffee producing families who get direct financial assistance and attention from the company’s agronomists to improve their crops, processing, financial stability, etc. I don’t have any information about varieties, altitudes, processing, etc, although I can safely say I’m 99% sure this is a washed coffee (pretty easy guess from Central America, although naturals and honeys are getting very popular there). I did run samples of this on my new-fangled Roast Vision and it came out 19 every time. The Roast Vision is a super easy to use, super compact (and super inexpensive, relative to other devices on the market) instrument that measures and quantifies the visual roast level of a coffee on a scale of 0-34. The higher the number, the lighter the roast. 19 is pretty much right in the middle of medium according to the Roast Vision’s calibration, which certainly matches Pirate Island’s “medium” roast level on the bag. Pirate Island Coffee tells us this coffee has flavor notes of, “milk chocolate, berries, citrus and caramel.”
I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water (I actually got distacted and overpoured a bit for 367g of water on this review cup but it didn’t make a difference I could notice) in a Trinity Origin flat bottom dripper with Kalita 155 filter. I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation during brewing and my grinder is a Knock Aergrind for pourovers. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the total brew time, including the bloom, was 3:40.
The aroma from this cup is nice and inviting… caramelized sugars and a hint of nuttiness that reminds me of something like peanut or almond brittle. Taking a sip, this is a medium bodied coffee and I’m getting some nice hits of coconut and a buttery note that works really well with that, too. These flavor notes tend to either die off fast or my palate attenuates to them quickly, so we’ll see how long they stick around. I’ll enjoy them while they last, though! There is a medium to dark caramel sweetness anchoring the base of this coffee. As the cup cools I’m getting some chocolate notes and some nuttiness, maybe along the lines of almond or pecan although I sometimes struggle with calling out specific nuts unless they are REALLY obvious in the flavor. Dutch process cocoa definitely comes out in the early aftertaste and this whole coffee sort of reminds me of some ice cream I made recently with dutch process cocoa, coconut and almond. It was really good and so is this coffee! The middle and second half of the sip get some nice acidity that brightens this coffee up and gets my taste buds going. I’m getting something citrusy here as well as a subtle hint of berry jam that hides in the background and is a little more revealed in the finish and early aftertaste. This coffee definitely isn’t a berry bomb, so don’t go into it expecting Ethiopian natural levels of berry notes, but I’m certainly picking some up here. The citrus note is a little tough for me to pin down specifically and that is unusual for me because I generally am pretty good at specifically identifying citrus flavors in coffee. There is a bit of lemon here, more like lemon hard candy, and something sweeter, not quite orange juice, not quite grapefruit juice, but something in that range. This coffee has a sweet finish and rolls into that very nice chocolate/cocoa and subtle berry jam aftertaste. The aftertaste lingers pleasantly and the cocoa notes just stick around for as long as I can stand it before another sip. Pirate Island says, “Our medium roast makes this a perfect coffee for everyday consumption” and at $10/12oz and with this flavor profile, I would certainly agree. This is what I call a crowd-pleaser coffee because it’s sweet and familiar and super easy-drinking but also has some nuance and flavors to pull out for the coffee geeks. This La Campa Reserva is the coffee equivalent of that friend we all have who gets along with everyone!