Description

Coffee Tasting Notes

This coffee is everything that we love in washed coffees from Gedeb. In many ways, this is exactly why we spend hundreds of hours tasting thousands of coffees: to find a gem like this. Gedeb opens with bright citrus notes of lime and meyer lemon. The sweetness is very clean like that of a simple syrup or a bright honey. Floral notes of peach, apricot, jackfruit, black tea, rose, vanilla, jasmine, and honeysuckle bring up the later portion of the cup’s profile. The cup finishes with a combination of black tea, honey, vanilla, and citrus notes which creates the impression of Earl Grey tea.

About The Coffee Producer

The Black Oak team was ecstatic when we first tasted this coffee. Not every year is a good year for Ethiopian coffees. In addition to coffee having on and off yearly crop cycles, weather patterns dramatically impact both the volume and quality of coffee.

Last year’s Ethiopian coffee crop was one of these disappointing years. We cupped dozens if not hundreds of Ethiopian samples to find a couple we were happy having on our menu. So it brought us great joy to taste through the first of the fresh crop Ethiopian coffees and find that a large proportion of this year’s lots are of excellent quality. This coffee was our unanimous favorite across several rounds of blind analysis.

This lot is from the Gedeb Zone, one of the most distinguished coffee growing areas in Ethiopia, especially for washed coffees. The coffee was processed on a relatively new mill- Halo Hartume. The mill was founded in 2013 and began exporting their coffee directly in 2017.

Direct export allows for the mill to circumvent the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange, which in turn allows the millers to sell their coffee in smaller lots at prices more in line with the coffee’s quality, greatly incentivising improvements to coffee quality.

How To Brew This Specialty Coffee

Washed Ethiopian coffees are notoriously finicky to brew. The ethereal, floral notes which make these coffees so unique and delicious are easily lost to an over extracted brew. We recommend starting with a 1:15 brew ratio. Lower water temperatures- on the order of 185-195F- and faster brew times- no more than around 3 minutes- produce great cups. These parameters limit the maximum well-extracted size of the brew to a medium sized cup.

Varieties: Kurume, Ethiopian cultivars 74110 & 74112

Processing Method: Fully Washed, Dried on Raised Beds

Altitude: 6600–7200’

Producer: 396 producers organized around the Halo Hartume washing station

Roast: Light