Cafetada Coffee Co. recently reached out to me via Instagram and sent their three available coffees. I decided to start with their Berani light roast, so let’s check it out!
Purchase this coffee for $15/12oz
CAFETADA COFFEE CO. BERANI
According to Cafetada’s website, the word “cafetada” is Spanish for a coffee gathering with a purpose. They state their purpose to be providing “great tasting coffee for the relentless. It charges doers every morning, with a purpose and duty…” Cafetada implores you to “Be a Doer, don’t settle” and this is good life advice for anybody. The “about us” page is pretty sparse on Cafetada’s website, so with a little digging I was able to find that the company was formed in Orlando, FL earlier in 2018, and their Instagram started activity in November. Cafetada is using Orlando Coffee Roasters as their roaster, so like quite a few coffee companies out there, Cafetada appears to be a brand name with the roasting and packaging being outsourced. This is somewhat common in coffee and quite common in craft beer, for example. And it makes sense given the relatively high cost of production coffee roasting as a business.
Cafetada sent me three coffees to try and I’m starting with their Berani, billed as a “light roast” on the label. Regular readers know I dig transparency and I love reading about exactly where every coffee comes from and who grows it and etc, so I was a little disappointed by the generally vague information on Cafetada’s website, however, I also know I’m not a normal consumer of coffee and what appeals to me may not be in line with how or a who a company is marketing. For me, more info is always better, but I don’t hold it against coffee brands when they don’t agree. For Berani, Cafetada tells us this is specialty-grade Arabica from fams in Central and South America, as well as East Africa. The site gives us tasting notes of, “hints of caramel and balanced body, with a crisp, sweet finish.”
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 brewer with Kalita 155 filter. I pour through a Melodrip to keep the pouring consistent and controlled and my grinder is a Knock Aergrind. My brew, including a 30 second bloom, came in at just under 3:00 total.
One thing I can’t help but notice with this coffee is that it looks a lot darker than I expected, solidly in what I would call a “medium” roast and maybe leaning toward the dark side of medium, even. I am seeing some spots of oils on the surface of some of the beans, suggesting that some of the beans in this blend made it to or very close to second crack. The thing about terms like “light,” “medium” and “dark” is that these are pretty vague, ambiguous words. One man’s light roast is another man’s medium-dark. Visual inspection doesn’t always tell the whole story, but coupling that with my tasting notes, I personally think this is coffee would fit more specialty drinkers’ “on the darker end of medium” expectation.
Aroma on this Berani blend is nice and sweet caramelized sugar with some roastiness to it. Taking a sip I’m getting the same in the flavors. This has a heavy body with a silky, slippery mouthfeel like an oatmeal stout. There is a lot of caramel in the sweet base of this cup and if I hold and agitate the coffee in my mouth a little it kicks up a fair amount of roast notes. There’s enough sweetness to this roast that the roastiness doesn’t overpower it or cause any feelings of dryness on my palate, so it actually adds a nice dimension to the cup, so long as you like that slightly smoky, slightly ashy roastiness. In small amounts like this, I do enjoy it and it plays nicely and balances the sugary sweetness of this blend. There are some high notes to this coffee, too, offering more balance to the sweetness. I’m mainly getting a crisp, apple-like acidity that reminds me of apple juice. There may be a tiny citrus hint in there, too, that seems to come out more in the long aftertaste for me than in the sip itself, but it’s very subtle. There’s a bit of a milk chocolate vibe to the cup, too. The finish is sweet and this is a nice, pleasant, super-balanced, super easy drinker without a lot of complexity, but that’s not always a bad thing.
I dig Cafetada’s Berani blend. I definitely wouldn’t call it a light roast, but I am interested to see the other two coffees they sent me, which are labeled as a “medium-dark” and “dark.” If “French roast” level is the end of the spectrum for dark, then this very well could be “light” relative to that! But that’s the challenge of words in coffee and expectations of consumers. All that aside, this is a nice drinking coffee and I enjoy it a lot. This is the kind of coffee I think of on those mornings when I want something a little darker, a little less complex… one of those coffees I can brew up and drink while working and not feel guilty about not giving 100% of my attention to in picking out and appreciating all the nuances. I call coffees like this “crowd pleasers” because I think there is something for specialty drinkers to like, but there are familiar tones for people who are used to darker, more mainstream roast profiles, too. I’d like to crank this up on my espresso machine, but we’re doing some light kitchen renovation and I probably won’t have that up and running again until next week. Drop in on my Instagram for updates like that. I suspect this will make a nice, traditional-leaning espresso or a killer cafecito, but I’m off sugar in a big way these days so I can’t test that theory out! Then again, I’ve never met a coffee that didn’t like having sugar added to it, so it’s a safe guess! Bravo, Cafetada, I’m looking forward to going into the darker end of the coffee spectrum with you!