Peru El Arenal Yojan Pérez Fully Washed Crown Jewel

Boxes 0

Warehouses Oakland

Out of stock

Intro by Chris Kornman

Last year we surreptitiously added a small selection of Peruvian coffee to the Crown Jewel menu. I don’t think we realized how excited we were until we began seeking coffees to feature on our opening menu at The Crown. Yojan Perez’s coffee became a staple for the early months as a pour over. Easygoing and deceptively complex, the coffee was exactly the kind of cup you could come back to day after day and be both completely satisfied and still surprised by something new.

Well, it’s 2020, and we’re thrilled to have Don Yojan’s coffee back, and true to form. Delicately floral, effortlessly sweet, gently citric, and capped by hints of ripening berries, this coffee is memorable and thoroughly delicious. We can’t wait to share it, and our only regret is that there’s such a limited supply.

Trader and certifications specialist Rosi Quiñones has been instrumental in sourcing exciting new coffees from the country, many (like this one) from the Aroma del Valle association, a relatively small collective of coffee producers banded together to market and export from the north of the country, in and around San Ignacio, Jaén, and Cutervo provinces.

Farmer Yojan Pérez produced this coffee on two small farms called La Piedra and Playa Grande in the Arenal community of Santo Tomas, located in the heart of the Cutervo National Park, Peru’s oldest ecological preserve. The region boasts a wide range of biodiversity of both flora and fauna, and in addition to the native forests Don Yojan is growing vegetables, plantains, yuca, and root vegetables.

Green Analysis by Chris Kornman

This coffee from Yojan Pérez comes to us with very high density, low moisture content, and low water activity. The coffee has also been nicely sorted to about 85% screen size 16-18. The good physical specs and tight size distribution should make for consistent roasting, though the coffee may need a little more heat during the earlier stages.

The farms have a nice mix of cultivars including legacy varieties like Bourbon its short mutation Caturra, as well as hybrids like the compact Catuaí and introgressed Catimor. Intercropping with multiple cultivars is an important step in a multi-pronged approach to resisting problematic afflictions like rust fungus.

Ikawa Analysis by Chris Kornman

We’ve updated our V2 Ikawa Pro machines with the latest Firmware version (24) and run on “closed loop” setting. Our roasters underwent full service in October of 2018 which included replacement heating elements and an updated PT 1000 temperature sensor, and were recalibrated in September 2019.

After our first pass on manual sample roast, the Ikawa roaster is usually the next step in the process of evaluating quality. This week, our Ikawa roasts landed on a cupping table alongside Evan’s Quest roasts, and it was a really fun comparison.

This batch highlighted the coffee’s silky body but muted the acids a little. Apricot was the most common flavor note, with accompanying baking spice, dark chocolate, fig, raisin, clementine orange, and maple.

You can download the profile to your Ikawa Pro app here:

Roast 1: Crown 6m NatEth ck1.4

Roast Analysis by Alex Taylor

It’s been really exciting to see the first coffees we served when we opened The Crown come back through the Crown Jewel pipeline! We all have such fond memories of how amazing these coffees tasted last year, and while there’s always the possibility that the excitement of The Crown’s opening skewed our memories, I do not think that has been the case. Each time we’ve tasted these new arrivals I have been super impressed.

It’s been a while since I jumped on the Probatino for some CJ analysis roasts, but I was happy to knock the rust off. I went with one of my usual roast plans: start with a low heat soak, turn up the gas shortly after turnaround, and start stepping off the gas a little after color change. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but this dense coffee quickly soaked up all the heat I threw at it and left me wishing I had started at a slightly higher gas setting, or at least turned up the gas slightly earlier. No need to panic, though, as the roast carried on at a decent clip through the middle of the roast. I stepped off the gas slightly about 90s after color change and then again 5 degrees before I was expecting first crack. The coffee cracked right on cue, but boy was I not ready for the coffee to crash so much. I gave it a little more heat to get things back on crack, but I still would have like to take this coffee a little hotter with a little less development time.

All told, this coffee was still delicious on the cupping table (perks of roasting really high quality green coffee: it’s really hard to mess it up)! We tasted lots of orange blossom and tangerine up front, rounded out by loads of milk chocolate and caramel, and a nice cinnamon-y finish. Given another chance, I’d give this coffee more heat early on to try to cut down the total roast time; and just a touch more alertness at the end of the roast should allow you to manipulate development time and end temperature effortlessly!

Quest M3s Analysis by Evan Gilman

Unless otherwise noted, I follow a set standard of operations for all my Quest roasts. Generally, I’ll allow the machine to warm up for 15 minutes until my environmental temperature reading is at least 250F, weigh out 150g batch size, and begin roasting when I’ve reached my desired charge temperature.  Read my initial post here and my updated post here.

It’s always a comfort to see a familiar coffee come through the queue on Crown Jewels. Sr Pérez’s coffee was a mainstay of our early menu at The Crown, and to say the flavor of his coffee is nostalgic is an understatement.

This coffee was a pleasure to roast. I tried something new with this week’s Quest M3s roasts – starting at full heat application (about 11.5A) and maximum airflow until turning point. At turning point, I quickly reduced heat application to the usual 9.5A, and cut airflow to the minimum. I was going for the most extreme heat an airflow method possible on the Quest, and it seems to have worked.

At 2:55 / 275F I began reintroducing airflow, and gently reduced heat application afterward at 3:45 / 310F; I kept that level of heat going until I dropped the coffee into the cooling tray. At 6:40 / 380F I could tell the coffee was getting close to first crack, and maxed out the airflow to abate any smoke. An intriguing note of green tea started emanating from the roaster right around first crack. Finishing at 8:35 / 396.5F, this coffee was on the lighter side, but definitely performed well on the cupping table.

This may be my favorite Peruvian coffee since it came in last year. Clear cranberry tartness with thick apricot and brown sugar notes graced our palates. Raisin and red, spiced apple made an appearance as well. This coffee performs excellently as a filter drip (I know that for certain), but I would also hazard to say that it would taste amazing as a full or partial immersion (Aeropress, Siphon) as well. This is a super sweet coffee that will probably be the least divisive thing on the menu for a good while!

Brew Analysis by Alex Taylor

It can be challenging to come up with new things to try for our weekly brew analysis, but this week we had a fun two-birds-with-one-stone sort of idea. We always color track our roasts to provide concrete numbers for roasters to be able to reference, but for our Quest roasts, this typically consumes all the coffee we just roasted! But this week, Evan asked “Why not use the ground coffee from color tracking for brew analysis?” Short answer, the coffee grounds for color track are usually finer than we prefer for manual brews, but still – we should have thought of this sooner. So for our first round of brews, Elise brewed up the quest roasts (using a Melodrip to try to accomodate the finer grind) and I brewed a round of v60’s using coffee from the Probatino roasts.

The brew of the Quest roast here was really fascinating. We tasted orange blossom and juice, sarsaparilla/root beer, stone fruit, and a lot more florality than we were initially expecting! The second brew yielded great results as well, with notes of tangerine, dried cherry, honey, apricot, raisin, and dark chocolate. Even more notable with the brew of the Probatino roast was just how easily we extracted 22.16%! Nothing about our brew recipe was unusual, but this coffee was just waiting to jump right into our cups!