Bettys Peruvian Pangoa

Bettys are perhaps better known for their Tea Rooms, and for the fact that they own Taylors of Harrogate. However, they have a separate online presence and even have their own range of coffees, and they were kind enough to send a sample my way.

This is their Peruvian Pangoa, a medium-dark roasted coffee from the Ashaninka region. This is one of the areas where the wonderfully named Yorkshire Rainforest Project (now rolled into their Trees for Life campaign) works, so it's nice to see that 10% of the price of this coffee goes to the project.

The grounds have a nice rich aroma of milk chocolate and redcurrants, an undercurrent of toasted nut and just a hint of pipe tobacco.

On brewing, the toasted nuttiness comes through more clearly and there's still a fruitiness, but the chocolate has gone.

It's not a particularly sweet coffee in the mouth and the fruit from the aroma doesn't really put in much of an appearance. That said, it's got a decent body to it, and the nutty character comes through nicely. The finish is short but nicely bitter, with a distinctly tannic hit.

Initially pleasant but unremarkable, this coffee has grown on me over time – easy drinking, but complex enough to stand out from the crowd, this earns 3.5 stars.

On a slightly different note, can I make a plea to all online coffee retailers – if you're going to include photographs of coffee beans, could you make them of the actual beans and not just a random generic "beans" image? I say this because Bettys have clearly used exactly the same photograph for this, their Nepal Snow River and Ethiopian Mocha Limu coffees.

To be fair, this is hardly an issue unique to Bettys – I actually struggle to think of any online shop that doesn't do this – and it's not like anyone actually buys coffee based on how it looks, but it (perhaps irrationally) annoys me.

Many thanks to Bettys for the sample.

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This review was originally published 29th April, 2013. It was last updated 1st June, 2023.