India – Pearl Mountain

This coffee plantation was planted in 1920 by Shivappaiya Patre, who cultivated the estate and called it Ratnagiri which when translated to English means Pearl Mountain. This estate has now been passed on to the 3rd generation of Estate owners, Rohith and Ashok Patre. The coffee is planted between 1200 and 1500 meters in a zone of the Western Ghat mountains that gets consistently heavy rainfall. The coffee on the farm is interplanted with pepper vines (which are grown on the canopy of large shade trees) and cardamom groves. The Patre family is extremely quality conscious. The coffee is grown under shade trees midst pepper vines and cardamom groves. The carefully picked cherries are sorted prior to pulping, fermented between 42 and 72 hours and hand-washed in water from clear mountain streams. The mild vibrance and clean cup taste really sets this Indian Arabica coffee apart from the regions standard.

This coffee has an underlying bittersweetness accented by toasted grain, and mild raw sugars. A sweet underlay of malt syrup saturated the steam coming off the wet grounds, along with accents of brown spices, and some nutty intensity. This isn’t the first time we’ve had this coffee, though it’s the first we’ve published for sale, and I found the bittersweetness in the cup to be moderately intense, with a nice level of complexity. There’s a nice interplay of bittersweet cocoa and accents of praline nuts, malted grains, and a some burnt sugars in the aftertaste. This coffee has pleasant roast flavors that, along with body, are dense in mouthfeel, especially in the darker roasts. These are the kind of cup characteristics that have “espresso” written all of them.