Ethiopia Lemon Candy

We’ve had the pleasure of tasting this incredibly complex coffee for a couple moths now. After brewing hundreds of cups throughout the roasting dial-in process,, we’ve found this coffee to take on many different flavors based not only on the roast profile, but also how it is brewed. This coffee can present beautiful and complex acidic flavors that are sweet, vibrant, and very much tea-like.

Throughout our testing the sweetness of this coffee has always been the same. It tastes very much like clean white sugar. Along with this sweetness, you may also get incredibly vibrant jasmine-like florals, or pink and white flowers (depending on how you brewed this coffee). Calling this coffee “Lemon Candy” was a bold move because it gave us SO MUCH diversity in flavor! Though the lemon candy-like flavor always remained in the cup, we found you could really push out orange flavors with some brew methods and water profiles. We even got loads of tropical fruit notes in some brews that tasted like nothing but Mango Nectar juice! There were also some coffees that tasted more like pink lemonade, which we really loved, though it also had heightened bitterness and sourness. Though this coffee is diverse in its acidity presentation, we think Lemon Candy was the best way to describe this coffee in its entirety for the majority of people brewing and tasting this coffee.

My favorite part about this coffee is the texture and the finish! The texture is sticky, like a simple syrup and can linger on your tongue for what seems like forever. The aftertaste is incredibly refreshing like drinking an Earl Grey tea. On the exhale, you can feel that bergamot (think sweet lemon + orange peel) or jasmine notes travel throughout your senses. To us, this texture and finish is a sign of a very great green coffee and a well-executed roast!

We have been experimenting a lot with pre-grinding this coffee and brewing it 1-10 days later. This can easily increase your extraction yield if the coffee is fresh, say within 1 day to 2 weeks (maybe more) of “resting” after being ground.

However you choose to drink this coffee, we think you’ll have a great experience tasting a vibrant, sweet and clean washed coffee from Ethiopia!

-Connor