Happy Monday! Let’s check out the third and last coffee from my friends at Cafetada Coffee Co. in Florida. I’ve saved their darkest roast for last, so let’s slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $15/12oz (free shipping on orders over $30, also 20% off code for first order)
Other reviews in this series: Berani (light roast) | Syndicate (medium roast)
CAFETADA COFFEE CO. DOER’S PLACE
Cafetada Coffee Co. is a coffee brand located in Orlando, Florida and, according to their website, Cafetada is a Spanish word for a coffee gathering that has a purpose. Cafetada makes coffees for “the relentless” and their tagline is, “Be a doer, don’t settle.” It looks like Cafetada Coffee Co. started in 2018 and they appear to be contract roasting their coffees through Orlando Coffee Roasters. This is not a bad option for a startup coffee brand because roasting equipment and expertise are expensive, so it may be more common than people think that brands contract roast their coffee and are free to really market and grow their businesses. This is common in craft beer, too.
In any case, Cafetada sent me three of their coffees to try out, the Berani light roast, Syndicate medium roast, which is their flagship coffee, and this Doer’s Place, which is their dark roast. I wondered just how dark this sucker was going to be because the Berani was nudging up to second crack as the light roast and Syndicate was into second crack, so I knew this one would be really dark! And, sure enough, opening the bag reaveals really dark, really oily beans that are in the “French” to “Italian” roast zone…. roasted about as dark as coffee can go before it burns. In the world of specialty coffee, this is somewhat of a no-no, but I’m always open to trying coffee out and tasting it for what it is. The fact remains that a lot of coffee drinkers enjoy a dark roast, and you’ll see this reflected in the trend in specialty coffee that the-lighter-the-better Third Wave roasters are all roasting a bit darker and most are putting a “darker roast” on the menu. Give the people what they want! LOL
The reason dark roasts get a bad rap in specialty coffee is legitimate, though. At a certain point, the coffee becomes about the roast and no longer about itself. In a segment of the industry where it’s all about the coffee, where it was grown and by whom, the varieties, how they were processed, etc, taking a coffee to a dark roast negates a lot of that. You can dark roast a Kenyan and a Colombian and a Sumatran and you won’t be able to tell a lot of difference at a point. It’s like taking a great cut of steak and cooking it into well done territory. All the characteristics that made that cut of meat so great are gone. All that being said, it’s important to know that you can’t just throw coffee in a drum roaster and let it rip and when it’s as black as Oreo’s drop it and cool it and call it a day. Doing a dark roast that still tastes good and is enjoyable takes skill.
Cafetada’s Doer’s Place is a blend of coffees from Central America and South America and it’s roasted by Orlando Coffee Roasters. Cafetada gives us tasting notes of, “dark chocolate, full balanced body and low acidity.”
This Doer’s Place grinds really, really soft, another testament to how dark it is, and the grounds look like crushed up Oreo’s (without the icing). I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water like I do for all coffees, dark or not. I’m using a Trinity Origin with a Kalita 155 filter and a Melodrip to control the pulse pouring. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind. With a 30 second bloom this coffee brewed fast at 2:55 total.
The aroma from this cup is lots of roast notes, some straight up carbon/charcoal notes when freshly made, but as it cools, it mellows some into darkly caramelized to slightly burned sugar (less burned sugar maybe than like those burned parts of a toasted marshmallow over a campfire). At the freshly brewed temp, this coffee is all carbon, but as it cools I get a medium bodied coffee with a balance between sweet and bitter that almost 100% comes from the roast, as expected. Darker roasts do enjoy the benefit of a lot of sugar caramelization, and this Doer’s Place has that. There is dark, dark caramel and burned marshmallow (in a good way), but on the other side of the teeter totter there is a fair amount of bitterness from the high roast level. Lighter roasts tend to get their balance from the fruity acids in the cup, but at a certain point the acidity of darker roasts is pretty much gone and it’s the roast itself that provides the balance to the sugars. Personally, I enjoy this and the roasty smokiness and bitterness doesn’t bother my palate a bit, although this wouldn’t be my go-to every morning. This is also the type of coffee that drives a lot of people to add cream and sugar to the cup. As a vehicle for both, coffees like Doer’s Place are great because they can handle all those additions without a problem. Considering this coffee was born in southern Florida, where the cafecito or Cuban coffee is king, this coffee makes sense in that context. Coming out of an espresso machine or a moka pot and having an ungodly amount of whipped sugar added to it would be great for this coffee! I haven’t tried this coffee as straight espresso, but I did take the medium-roast Syndicate to work and used it on my superauto machine there and it was tough to balance… very roasty, a bit astringent. Coffees like this need to get balance from somewhere and so as a straight shot, they are tough to manage without milk or sugar.
All that said, this is not a bad coffee. It stands up to the better quality dark roasts I’ve enjoyed. In the context of a very dark roast, Doer’s Place is good. If a coffee geek were to go to their favorite specialty cafe and order this hoping to be able to taste the terroir of a mountainside microclimate or the unusual process the farmer used after picking, they wouldn’t find any of that. Rip a shot of this and make a cafecito? You’re one step closer to heaven than you were!
