It’s insanely cold in Kansas City this morning, so let’s bring a little bit of Florida north with Cafetada’s Syndicate blend! Slurp…
Purchase this coffee directly for $15/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Berani “light” roast
CAFETADA COFFEE CO. SYNDICATE
Cafetada is Spanish for a coffee gathering with a purpose. Cafetada’s website talks about providing great tasting coffee for the “relentless” and charging “doers” every morning with a “sense of purpose and duty.” Cafetada started in 2018 and they are contract roasting their three blends through Orlando Coffee Roasters. This is a model that is not uncommon in coffee, as roasting equipment and expertise is expensive, so if you can have someone else roast your coffee for your according to your specs, then that’s not a bad thing in some cases and can be a smart business move, especially for a new company and brand.
I took a look at Cafetada’s Berani blend recently, which was billed as their “light roast” and I enjoyed the coffee, but did disagree with it’s “light” roast label. For me, the Berani blend was medium, and toward the darker end of medium at that. The coffee tasted good and I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t the light roast I was expecting. This is why use of terms like light, medium and dark are troublesome in coffee… these words mean different things to different people, for sure. Cafetada told me that their Syndicate blend is their flagship coffee and that their Berani blend was darker than intended, so I was curious what a “medium dark roast” would look like in the Syndicate.
It’s dark. Really dark.
Again, in and of itself, that’s not an issue for me, but I am going to say that I think Cafetada is about one step darker than the bag says. In other words, the “light” Berani was medium and this medium Syndicate, to me, is dark. What is their Doer’s Place, which is labeled as a dark roast, going to be? I can’t wait to find out, actually! LOL
Syndicate is a blend of African, Indonesian, Central American and South American coffees. Cafetada says it is, “loaded with smooth dark chocolate flavor and a touch of caramelized finish.” In the bag, this coffee is very dark with oils coating the entire surface of every bean, indicating that this is a coffee that went well into 2nd crack during roasting. Again, not inherently a bad thing, but that is dark territory by most standards. Grinding this in my Knock Aergrind, it’s a very soft bean because of the roast level and the grounds look like ground Oreo cookies. I’m using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin brewer. Total time took about 3:30 for this coffee.
Aroma on this coffee is dark, roasty, with some char notes as it is so dark and that’s expected. It’s a bit astringent and overly charred at hot temperatures, so definitely let this coffee cool down and it mellows out some. This tastes like a nicely done dark roast, to me. I’m getting a lot of roastiness throughout the flavors with a bit of smokiness in the finish and aftertaste. It’s sweet, but has balance from all that roast, which for my palate tends to be a little bitter, so the sugar development from the roasting is tempered by the bitterness that happens as some sugars are scorched. In coffee, this creates something that isn’t cloying and this would be a great coffee for anyone who likes the flavors of a dark roast and especially adds sugar or milk to their coffee. Oddly enough, I’m getting some ester notes in this cup, just a hint of banana to my palate, which works well with the roast and caramelized sugar notes.
The only downside to dark roasts is that at a certain point, it becomes more about the roast and less about the coffee. In other words, the lighter the roast, the more the individual characteristics of the beans come through. As the roasting progresses, you lose origin flavors and it becomes more about the skill of darkly caramelizing the sugars in the cup while origin flavors get covered up. In this way, all dark roasts are somewhat the same in the fact that the main flavors are dark caramelization and roastiness or smokiness. That being said, however, it is easy to do a dark roast poorly, and to me, this is a well done one. I personally like lighter coffees and more origin to come through, as that’s what really attracts me to coffee, but I’m different from a lot of the coffee drinking public in the USA, who do seem to prefer darker roasts like this, whether that’s because they really prefer it or because they haven’t been exposed to lighter roasts or taught how to appreciate them. I can see why Cafetada considers Syndicate its flagship coffee. It tastes good and would make a great vehicle for sugar and milk and that’s appealing to a lot of coffee drinkers! Nicely done!