This week’s coffee is a naturally processed Pacamara from the Ponderosa farm in Guatemala. I asked Sagebrush Coffee’s Matt Kellso, who is extremely knowledgeable and a very nice guy, how I can buy only the best of the best coffees, and he suggested I look for roasters who buy Cup of Excellence lots at auction. This is how I found Proud Mary.
They package the coffee in a 100 gram tin instead of the usual nipple bags. I paid $33 for 100 grams, which is less than what I’d like to pay, but I should be able to get four cups out of it, and I do like to slum it from time to time.
It looks like it was roasted on January 31st and packaged on February 12th, so the beans have been resting for about three weeks, which is perfect.
The beans are very easy to grind unlike Gesha, and there’s next to no “chaff,” which I always think is a good sign. 28 grams of beans yields…
(Do you even sift, bro?)
20 grams of perfectly consistent grind after sifting. The usual recipe, 15:1 … 50 ml and 30 seconds to bloom, second pour of 150 ml, final pour to 300 ml total. Of course I use a hand-blown Chemex because it costs three times as much, which means it’s three times as good. It’s also important that you pronounce Chemex, “sha-may.”
Two and half to three minutes to drain completely.
A deeper color than the Geshas…
Unlike the Geshas, which taste like tea, this tastes like coffee on the tongue. It is good! Balanced, rounded, clean … yes, sour, but a good sour, a complex sour … a delicate amount of acidity, not overwhelming, which quickly vanishes. This is a very good cup of coffee and a steal at around $9.25 a cup (beans only).
They say I’ll taste notes of peach, caramel, cinnamon and grapefruit. Nope, nope, nope, and nope. It tastes like coffee, but a very good coffee. A complex sour for sure.
I’ll have another cup tomorrow and then give away the rest of the tin since I’m not really into coffee.
There’s some more coffee on the way, so I’ll have a different cup next week to write about. But I’m not really looking forward to it since I don’t enjoy the taste of coffee. :-)
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