Sidamo v. Harar - No Holds Barred Cage Match, II

Yesterday, Ethiopia Sidamo attacked first, perhaps leaving Harar slumped against the turnbuckle. What can happen next in this epic battle?

In the other corner we have the rather interestingly named Ethiopia Harar Horse DP -Lot 17406. What about lot 17405? We'll never know....

This coffee was roasted right after the Sidamo, with the same profile. Here are the details:


Smelling the beans, you can easily tell the difference between Harar and Sidamo. The Harar smells like over the top tropical fruits - smashed up mangoes, pineapple, etc. Very heady, almost fermented. The Sidamo is more of a stone fruit melange: apricot, peach, etc.

In the cup, I also found the Harar more muted than I might have expected. I noted something similar with the Sidamo. I think it might have something to do with the initial temperature being too high. I am going to combine some of these trends and observations on roasting profiles into a different post when I have some extra time.

The fruity notes of the dry grounds are there, but are tempered with chocolaty flavors. There is some good acidity as well, but it is not the wild cup I imagined. Certainly it is tasty enough, but at this roast treatment I am not running out to stock up.

If I had to choose a winner, it would be the Sidamo, hands down. The complexity of the cup, how the fruit integrates with the more rustic and funky notes, and the pure intensity make it a winner for me. I wouldn't pass up either, but Sidamo gets the edge this time.

Next round: our current winner goes up against one of the icons of home roasting: Ethiopia Idido Misty Valley. Stay tuned....

Sidamo v. Harar - No Holds Barred Cage Match, I

When it comes to coffee, for me, Ethiopia is where it is at. The incredible variety, origin character, and history make these coffees truly special. I have in my possession a lot of Ethiopian beans, so I thought it would be fun to compare two especially lauded ones.

Both these coffees are dry processed, and hail from Harrar and Sidamo, two of the most famous areas of Ethiopian coffee production. Dry processed coffees leave some of the fruity mucilage layer of the coffee cherry in contact with the seed for some time during processing, leading to fruity flavors in the cup. Both these coffees are for the adventurous, since they can push the envelope of what many people interpret as "traditional coffee flavor"

In today's corner is Ethiopia Sidamo Dry Processed Biloya. This coffee has the distinction of being one of the highest rated coffees at Ken David's coffeereview.com. What weight do I place behind this recommendation? None whatsoever. Still, it is a data point. If you search around the web, you will find lots of accolades about this coffee.

I first roasted this coffee back in August of 2007. My tasting notes were effusive to say the least:

"Very impressive, complex and changeable coffee. Dry grounds are overwhelmingly estery, spicy, fruity, chocolaty. Aroma in cup is intense cinnamon. First third of cup is dry spice, fleeting leather. 2nd third is cinnamon-laced apricot; last third is a deep wininess that reminds me of a Kenya coffee. Very very nice"

Wow, I must have had a lot of free time back then to write this stuff.

Anyway, I roasted a new batch on Friday with the following profile:



And the cup today? Yeah, it's good. I am not sure I have the enthusiasm I previously had for it, though. I can imagine a few reasons why. First, the coffee is a bit older now. Second, I have tried a lot more coffees since I first tried this stuff, and I am less easily impressed, and third, the roast profile was a tad different this time.

Don't get me wrong - this is a tasty cup. "Cinnamon-drenched apricot" is a good description. In a way, this coffee reminds me more of a Yemen than a Ethiopian coffee. The Harrar I'll talk about tomorrow is quite a bit different beast. As for which is better, you'll have to wait and see.

India Mallali Estate "Tree-Dried Natural"

Coffee from India. I have had a few interesting examples over the years, but of course nothing beats the puerile pleasure of saying "Mysore Nuggets Extra Bold". Come on - say it a few times - you know you are laughing.

Anyway, today is not about that coffee, but about an unusual coffee from India that is actually dried on the tree. The coffee cherries are left to ripen on the tree and essentially turn into little raisins. If this works well, you should get some interesting character to the coffee. If it doesn't, well....

As an aside, dry-processed coffees like this one are always going to be more variable since wet processed coffees allow you to sort out unripe cherry more easily (they float), instead of having to do things by hand. I can't imagine how much work went into this coffee, and for something which ultimately sold for a few dollars a pound.

I have roasted this coffee a few times, so the notes are a compilation over those sessions. This is a somewhat low-altitude coffee, so it is easy for the roast to get away from you if you heat it up too fast. Slow and gentle wins the race. The coffee was roasted to a Full City level.



This coffee has some very nice dry-roasted peanut notes, low acidity, but coupled with an interesting fruitiness. In the aroma, I swear I smell ripe melon. Interesting! I am not sure I have tasted anything quite like it. It is sort or a cross between something like a low-acid Sumatra coffee mixed with the fruitiness of an Ethiopian. The combination is somewhat unexpected, but very pleasant nonetheless.

Kenya Thika - Gethumbwini Peaberry

This is the last of my beans from the 2007 main crop. I thought this coffee was one of the best of 2007. My notes from last October read, "Intense stuff. In-your-face sweet grape and blackberry aroma. Powerful, crisp, sweet, and acidy. Medium body. A powerhouse of a coffee that keeps getting better and better every day I drink it". Hardly faint praise.

Since the new crop had come in, I wanted to finish off all of the last stuff I had laying around, so I roasted it up the other day. The profile was slightly different than the first time:



This was a faster roast then back in October, and I think the body suffered a bit. However, the intense fruit character that I love is still there. Think ripe cherries, blackberries, grapes overlaid with fresh sage and other herbs. It is definitely a unique taste profile for coffee, and quite unexpected. Personally I love the stuff, but I could see people who favor a more "classic" coffee taste might be put off.

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Addendum 6/11/08

As is often the case, this coffee gets better with more rest. Besides the great fruitiness, I get a strong sense of Ricola candies in the aroma. Interesting! The herbal qualities of this coffee are something I hadn't fully appreciated before with previous roasts.

Yemen Mokha Mattari Redux

Bear with me here - I am highly caffeinated at the moment. I consumed a lot of espresso this morning to write this piece. Such are the sacrifices we make....


I described last month a roast of Yemen Mokha Mattari from Sweet Marias. Despite some mishaps during roasting, it turned out particularly well as brewed coffee. Last Friday I decided to roast up some more of these beans, but take them darker for use as espresso. The claim is that Yemen's like a lot of rest to really come together flavor-wise, so this is a good test. I also added the picture above to show the "before and after" of the coffee.

Here is the profile:


As you can see, another minute and a half of roast compared to the previous gets you into second crack. This is what I was looking for in this roast. The espresso extraction process can really exacerbate acidic flavors, and light roasts in general don't do well. I roasted this one dark (for me) to get better balance.

As an interesting aside, you can take a look at the variation in color post-roast (common in dry-processed beans) in this picture:

If you compare this to something like the picture in the blog's title (which is a Guatemalan coffee), you should see the differerce.

So, what about the espresso? I tried this coffee three ways (shots pulled from my Rancilio Silvia machine):

Double espresso
Cappucino (double shot in ~6oz of milk)
Double ristretto

Now you are starting to understand the caffeine jag I am on....

Anyway, this stuff was darn good. The espresso was very intensely woody, with a packed house of "spice bazaar" tastes. Chewy and very long lasting. Great stuff, but a bit on the rough side. In milk, it really shined. The spice notes were still there, and solid chocolate notes cut well through the milk. The ristretto was probably the best of the bunch. A lot of the roughness was gone, and it was smooth, sweet, spicy, and exotic. I didn't get any real fruitiness in this one; it was more in the woody camp. Perhaps another roast treatment would pull out more fruit.

Kenya AA Giakanja Coop Coffee Mill

It look me some time to get to like Kenya coffees. The altitude and climate these coffees are grown at can produce some ferocious acidity in coffee. Some people like this, and some people don't. Originally, I didn't.

The issue is the difference between acidity and sourness. When the term "acidity" is used when referring to coffee, it is the slight puckering sensation and crispness to the cup that actually makes the coffee very refreshing and drinkable. However, when not done correctly (or under-roasted), this can turn into a grassy, sour flavor that can make your whole body shudder. Back in the day I roasted a lot of coffee that tasted like that and it really turned me off.

Now that I am pretty devoted to light roasted coffee. I find that when done correctly, the brightness of Kenya coffees comes with a sweetness and complexity that you will find in few other places. Now I can't get enough of the stuff.

This particular coffee was roasted quite lightly the first time around, back in March of this year:



My notes were as follows:
3/23/08: "Intense stuff. Very powerful flowery aroma - roses! Interesting bitterness to go with it. Perhaps could have ended the roast a tad sooner"

3/24/08: "This aroma is so weird - I have never smelled anything like it in a coffee. In your face rose bush aroma. Unique, but I don't care for it"

I tell you, I have had weird fruity aromas, intense florals, nuts, you name it. But this rose aroma was so strong it turned my stomach.

With a half pound left, I decided to pawn this coffee off on my co-workers. I decided to roast it much darker to see if I could drive off the weird aroma. The profile this time is as follows (yellow marks the differences from the previous):


This time the coffee was roasted into second crack. With this treatment, the odd rose aroma was gone, and I was left with a very nice, pungent, and rustic cup. Not a coffee I would rush to buy again, but certainly very drinkable. It never ceases to amaze me how the same coffee roasted different ways can be so different in the cup.

Roasting Apparatus

I just realized that I haven't mentioned what I am roasting with. All these roast profiles aren't that useful unless you have some idea what I am doing.

Anyhoo, I originally started out roasting using an iRoast2. This is a decent starter machine, but I had some quality issues with it (the power base kept dying), and the amount of beans you can roast at one time is rather limited. Still, the coffee was decent, and had the typical air-roaster quality of "brightness" in the cup.

At this point, a hoard of people are going to come out of the woodwork (or maybe not, since not too many people read these entries...) and tell me that you can produce great roasted coffee with a wok, a roasting pan, a heat gun and a dog bowl, a popcorn popper, a blowtorch, or perhaps a small thermonuclear explosion. In a sense they are correct, and you can read for hours and hours on the web about these things.

However, roasting coffee is more than "turning beans brown". The profiles of time and temperature make a huge difference to the final product. Even two roasts with exactly the same final roast time, with different ways of getting there can be completely different. It is useful to have some control over time and temperature (and ramp rate if you can get it). This can be done manually with some effort, but there are some machines out there that make it much simpler. I am a gadget guy, so I went the route of buying a GeneCafe.

I won't review the machine here; you can read about it in the link above, or search around on Coffee Geek or other web sites. Suffice to say that you have very good control over the key variables.

My typical batch size is 8oz. The way I drink coffee at home, that gets me through about a week. For espresso, I'll often drop it down to 6oz or so, since I drink less espresso than drip coffee. I also like to preheat the machine a bit before adding the beans. There is a lot of glass and metal that should get hot first, such that the thermal energy goes into the coffee beans instead of heating up the machine. Pre-heating can also have a pronounced effect on the ability to hear first crack, which I can talk about another time.

For cooling, I typically use the "Emergency stop" procedure which cools the coffee in the drum down to about 212 degrees. Then I move the coffee to a sheet pan on my granite countertop, which quickly cools things to room temperature. I then let the machine complete the rest of its cooling cycle down to 140 degrees, which hopefully will help out the lifetime of the roaster.

There are other options out there as well, ranging from the now very popular Behmor roaster, the Hottop, and others. However, my GeneCafe is going strong, and makes great coffee.

As for brewing the coffee, I have an article I need to parse through before posting here, but there is a lot to say on that topic as well.