Weekly Newsletter: Ethiopian Sidamo

I hope that you all had a wonderful Valentine’s Day!  I was spoiled with a decadent filet and lobster meal, complete with local organic carrots, a composed salad, king crab appetizer and chocolate cake for dessert.  Oh and roses and candlelight and gifts too.  If Trace wasn’t a coffee roaster, he might have been a chef: he certainly has the skills and creativity to excel in a restaurant.  We shared our Valentine’s meal with Chuck and Caroline, who are also great cooks and bakers, and whose talents resulted in the appetizer, salad, and dessert.  Two of the things that I enjoy most in life are good conversation and good food, so our communal meal was the highlight of my day for sure.

Last week we had a t-shirt giveaway going on here.  I realized later that I forgot to put down a date for drawing a name, so with no notice, today is the day.  The random number generator chose comment #8, so Sean Dunbar, you are our winner!  Come on in and pick up your free t-shirt!  I do appreciate all of the nice comments that were left on our blog–thank you for taking the time to enter.  If you didn’t win, we’ll do another giveaway soon, so stay tuned for your chance.

Earlier this week we had a coffee experience in progression.  Trace took each of us through the stages of our Ethiopian processing.  We started with smelling the green beans in the burlap sack.  Now green beans generally do not have a lot of aroma: they are at a stable point where they can safely be shipped and stored.  This Ethiopian, however, is pungent even green, and the scent was remarkably like blueberries.  Coffee is a berry, but I can attest to the fact that most green coffees do not remind you of their origin as the seed of a fruit!

The final stage was a French press of Ethiopian, freshly brewed and waiting for us to sample.  You can try the Ethiopian this week for yourself by mentioning the code in burgundy above (hint, it’s summer blueberry), and tell us what you think.  We discovered that it was a beautiful cup of African coffee with far more (you guessed it) berry tones than the citrus flavors you might expect.  It is more similar to our Yemen Mocha than the Rwandan that we featured a week ago, which makes sense geographically (it’s closer to Yemen than Rwanda).