17. Kansas

Kansas actually has fewer roasters than you might expect considering that Kansas City is a really good coffee town - most of the roasters (including my personal favorite, Messenger) do their work on the Missouri side. This doesn't mean there are no roasters in Kansas, of course, but it does mean that you have to look further to the west.  I kind of broke my own kind of rule for this project by selecting Topeka's PT's - I've had PT's coffee before, direct from a PT's cafe in Topeka.  But I've never ordered whole bean and brewed it myself before, so I think that's good enough for our purposes here.  There certainly are other roasters in Kansas, but PT's has one of the strongest reputations, so I felt like I had to include it.

State #17: Kansas

PT's Coffee Roasting Company
Topeka, KS

One word that tends to get my attention on a bag of coffee is "peaberry."  I've probably discussed this before, but if you don't know, a peaberry is what you get when only one half of the coffee seed develops inside the fruit.  Instead of getting two beans with flat edges, you get a single rounded bean.  Because it's a single bean drawing the full sugars of the fruit, peaberries are supposed to be a bit sweeter than regular coffee beans.  This batch was apparently a mix of Bourbon and Kent varietals; I had actually just roasted a pure Kent myself a couple weeks earlier, and that one had come out with a lot of spice notes.  This one started with a surprising top note of smokiness, with a milder pear-like acidity that shifted to a lot of lime as I kept drinking it.  The body was a nice medium, and the cup became sweeter as I went - by the back half, I was starting to be put in mind of sweet tea.  Overall, I rated this an 8, Very Good; I wasn't a big fan of the smokiness, but the rest of the cup was nice enough.

I feel like it's been a while since I've had any Colombian coffee - checking my database, in fact, the only other Colombian coffee I've had in the last three years (at least in terms of what I've made at home) that wasn't a rare varietal from Paradise Roasters was the one from the Connecticut entry on this list... and I wasn't a big fan of that one.  This one sounded good, though, and critically the only varietal listed was Caturra - one reason I haven't been wild about mainline Colombian coffee lately is because they regularly include varietals with a fair amount of Robusta genetics, and while I obviously understand why they do that, it means the flavors are not usually as good.  (This was my exact complaint in the Connecticut post, you'll note.)  I expected better out of this one - and it was better, but still not the greatest.  It was a perfectly drinkable morning cup of coffee, but the flavor complexity was not there for me - the citric hit of acid was pretty indistinct, and beyond that the profile was kind of flat.  There was a mild nuttiness and a surprising juicy bass note at the back end, but I like distinct flavors that pop out of a cup and those just weren't really present here.  I still gave it a 7, Good, because there was nothing unpleasant about the experience, but I wanted more.  Interestingly, this was a light roast - not to tell anyone how to do their job, but I couldn't help wonder if this could have benefited from a little extra time in the roaster.

Overall, PT's got a combined score of 15 off these two entries, which puts them in a three-way tie for sixth so far, basically in the lower portion of the top half, which I think is a fair representation of how I felt.  As I mentioned earlier, PT's is pretty well-known and well-regarded, so I was hoping for something more along the lines of what I got from Verve, but sometimes you don't end up picking the best offerings either.  It's entirely possible that if I'd ordered an Ethiopian I'd have been blown away.  That is the unfair part of this list, but I'd never be able to try the exact same coffee from 50+ different roasters anyway, so it's unavoidable.  Maybe after I finish I'll circle back to give some a second chance.  Anyway, next up is Kentucky, another state with a very obvious choice of roaster.  We'll see how it goes!