After wrapping up the infamous mini-series Tiger King on Netflix, there was really only one coffee shop I wanted to sample the wares of — Paper Tiger Coffee Company. As an introduction to their style, let’s meet their Mandheling through a Paper Tiger Sumatra coffee review.
Paper Tiger’s Backstory
Based in Vancouver, Washington Paper Tiger’s founds are the one-two combo of Sue and Kenny Fletcher. Armed with a brick and mortar cafe I’m nearly certain they are the only coffee roaster in the Pacific Northwest. đŸ™‚
Paper Tiger has been since 2012 or so and roasts on-site.
Pre-Grind: Paper Tiger Sumatra
The packaging from Paper Tiger was solid and the little hand-written note is always a personable touch. The black bags nestled inside gave me a quartet of options for this Paper Tiger introduction.
Upon breaking the seal of the Sumatra bag, my first impression wasn’t one that lead me to be blown away. The aroma was somewhat subdued, which isn’t the end of the world. I just love the first sniff from a newly opened bag, you know? Pulling in as much of that fresh roasted scent as I can, I get a lot of earthy notes from the bag itself.
A quick inspection of the wash-processed beans delivers no negative news. The color is fairly consistent, no obvious disparity in the roast. As far as chaff and other anomalies, there is nothing here that should give any coffee drinker pause.
Let’s See If This Paper Tiger Purrs
From here, it’s into the grinder to see what kind of drinkability the Paper Tiger Sumatra delivers. Once things start to perc, we get our first peek at the medium to dark roast.
As far as aromatics, there’s not a ton to offer. So let’s get right to the taste. That same earthy quality is definitely there on the first sip. This Sumatra offers up a touch of smokiness and toasty quality to it that seems to stick around on my palate after each sip for 10-15 seconds.
There is slightly more to this too – a certain smoothness that has a hint of sweet along with it too. Our buddy Kaplowitz calls it molasses. He might be right. But one thing he notes that we are definitely picking up on is a bit of peppercorn that nestles into the earthy notes underneath on this coffee.
Acidity Testing
A relatively dark roast, I’m not picking up on a ton of acid in this coffee. As we always attempt to do though, let’s take my feelings out of this and break out the pH meter to get an accurate reading.
We see this brewed coffee through a Barsetto drip machine delivers us coffee at a 5.7 on the pH scale. It’s still acidic but compared to many of the lighter roasts out there that can register closer to a 5.0, this Tiger is quite tame.
Paper Tiger Sumatra Coffee Review
Summary & Rating
As far as medium to dark roasts go, we found this to be quite drinkable. No cream necessary and the smokiness that turns me off about a lot of darker roasts didn’t get unruly here.
That said, the earthy undertones really did dominate the palate and I didn’t pick up on ton of nuance. I was unable to discover much of the sweetness that I was hoping to find. Because of that, we’re scoring this coffee as an 86. Not the head of the class, but a solid contributor that’s worth a spot in your coffee rotation, for sure.
