Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a natural Brazilian from my friends in Texas at Pirate Island Coffee. Enjoy!
PIRATE ISLAND COFFEE BRAZIL CERRADO NATURAL
Pirate Island Coffee is a new-ish 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. The kids play actual roles in the company, helping out mom and dad while simultaneously learning about entrepreneurship and running a business. Mindy’s daughter named the comany and they’ve been involved in tasks like marketing, as well as picking green coffees! Very cool, indeed. 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. Hopefully the gang fared well in Texas’s major infrastructure collapse with this crazy cold snap we had and that things bounce back quickly in that state!
This morning’s coffee is a natural from the Cerrado Region of Minas Gerais, Brazil. I don’t see this particular coffee listed as a current offering on Pirate Island’s website, so I think this was a test batch they sent to me for my opinion on it. Keep your eyes on their site and I’m sure it’ll appear sooner or later. Minas Gerais is where a lot of Brazil’s specialty coffee comes from, and the Cerrado region has coffee growing at 850-1100 meters above sea level or so. Two of Brazil’s disadvantages when it comes to coffee growing (or advantage, depending on how you look at it), are relatively low altitudes with relatively easy weather and growing conditions. A lot of the flavors prized by us coffee geeks come from high altitudes, where the temperature and conditions vary wildly during the day and at night and from day to day. This constant fluctuation seems to be really good for coffee flavor development. As such, Brazilian coffees tend to be pretty mellow and not the most interesting on the market, but over the years I have come to appreciate them for what they are. Brazilian coffees are often a component in a blend, serving as a somewhat neutral-flavored base with the other coffees in the blend adding more flavors. Since they don’t have a listing for this coffee on their site, I don’t have a lot (any) info about this coffee other than that it’s from Cerrado in Brazil and it’s a natural, so let’s just get right to it!
As far as processing goes, you find a lot of everything coming out of Brazil… washed, semi-washed and naturals like today’s coffee. Natural processing means the coffee is picked and then separated by hand (mostly and usually), then the coffee cherries are laid out on raised mesh beds for a period of time from a couple weeks to around a month on average. The cherries are circulated and mixed around a couple times per day usually and they start to dry out and ferment on the inside as the fruit breaks down, like drying grapes into raisins. After this, the dried fruits are run through a depulper, which removes the fruit and skins and a bit more processing is done to clean the seeds off (what we call coffee beans) and prepare them for further processing to get them shippable to roasters like Pirate Island. Brazilian natural coffees are A LOT more subtle than their African counterparts, which tend to have a lot of berry notes and other loud, more obvious flavors going on. You’ll never get a berry bomb out of Brazil, but what this processing does do is it tends to add a lot of body and sweetness to the cup.
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 (a standard type flat bottom, three-holed dripper like a Kalita Wave) using a Kalita 155 size filter. I’ve recently switched my pourover grinder from a Knock Aergrind to an Orphan Espresso Lido 3 and so far it’s what I’d expect from this company I have a lot of experience with! I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to keep the agitation minimal in the coffee bed during brewing. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the total brew time, including the bloom, came in at 3:30.
The aroma from this coffee is nice. When it was fresh from brewing I was getting some maple syrup notes, but those seemed to off-gas pretty quickly and now I’m left with a nice “coffee” aroma (LOL dumbest description ever, but you know what I mean… this coffee smells like coffee! LOL) with maybe a bit of apple and a hint of grape in the aroma for me. Taking a sip, this coffee has a nice, big body that I’d put in the range of a medium+ to heavy-, and it has a silky mouthfeel to it. True to form, this coffee isn’t going to knock your socks off in the flavor department, but it’s still a really nice cup. I’m getting a sweet base that reminds me of caramel, and coupled with that silky, heavy mouthfeel it gives this coffee a really luxurious and decadent vibe, making me feel like I’m splurging on a diet drinking this coffee! This is a low perceived-acidity cup, without a lot of bright fruitiness that comes with the acids found in coffee beans, but there are still some more subtle high notes here. I am getting a little malic acidity and that’s giving me some red apples or honeycrisp-like apple-ish tones that are very complementary with this cup. While it’s not obvious, I feel like I’m getting a hint of white grape juice in this coffee, too. Roastiness is minimal here and I’m getting a little pecan, maybe, or some other type of lightly-flavored nut. The finish is sweet with some cocoa notes to round this coffee out and give a bit of bitterness that keeps all that sweetness in check and balanced, and I am left with a long, lingering aftertaste.
This is a low-complexity coffee, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing and I am enjoying this coffee FAR more than I would think I would reading my own description. Yes, I adore high-complexity coffees with a lot of flavors to suss out, but there’s something to be said about a coffee like this Cerrado, too. Pirate Island have done a great job roasting this coffee for maximum sweetness and that heavy body and caramel apple vibe is just wonderful. Sure, it’s a bit one-dimensional but it does that dimension fantastically, so I have no complaints here whatsoever. This would be GREAT daily drinker for someone who wants a really good cup of coffee but isn’t looking to focus on that cup, thinking about flavors and development and etc. This would be a really good gateway coffee, too, for someone who is just taking their first steps on the specialty coffee path. I absolutely love this coffee and what Pirate Island have done with it, so my suggestion to them would be to keep this exact profile and get it bagged up for sale ASAP!
But Does it ‘Spro?
I have not had time to play with this coffee on my espresso machine, but I did just pull my first and only shot with it and it was great, luckiest shot of espresso ever! LOL I did 19.1g in, 28 seconds of the pump running, and ended up with 21-21.5g (I forgot already) in the cup, so more or less a ristretto. Nice body, nice crema, and I was very surprised that this shot had a lot of brightness to it. The first flavor that hit me was LOADS of cherry, and it was a VERY specific flavor recall from my past, too. My mom used to make this cherry dessert which was just a can of those goopy, thick pie cherries with a box of white cake mix made and poured on top, so you ended up with this crumble of white cake over these goopy cherries. It was that EXACT flavor! In the long finish I’m getting some tobacco notes and this clearly has a lot of potential as a single origin espresso or as a component of a blend. This is a very impressive coffee!
