We’re back in Africa, this time in Ethiopia, with Greenville, South Carolina roaster Bridge City Coffee. Their peaberry honey process from Long Miles Coffee Project in Burundi blew me away, so let’s see if they continue that trend with this natural Yirgacheffe! Links, then drinks!
Purchase this coffee directly for $14/12oz
Bridge City Burundi Munyinya Hill Peaberry Honey review
BRIDGE CITY COFFEE ETHIOPIA KONGA YIRGACHEFFE
Bridge City Coffee is a new company started in Greenville, SC by Jon Quigg and Gregory Ward (and with the support of their lovely wives, I’m sure!). Jon is actually a Kansas City native and he sent me some coffee last year that he had home-roasted, complete with bag art by his amazingly talented wife, Kenzi. I didn’t review that coffee, as he just wanted some personal feedback (it was really good!) and so I’m super happy to see that he is following his passion with the formation of Bridge City Coffee. Bridge City is a roastery only, but there are plans in the works for a cafe and a bigger operation as they grow. They are intent on using Bridge City Coffee to really re-invest in the community of their future employees, using Denver’s Purple Door Coffee, which employs teens and young adults who’ve been homeless, as a template. Very cool!
This morning’s coffee is a natural process from the Konga microregion that lies just about 4km outside of Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia. Coffees from Konga are prized for their bright citrus and stonefruit flavors and a lot of the coffee from this region tends to be washed, so it’s nice to have a natural from Konga once in a while, too. This washing station is near the town of Sede and about 5,000 farmers pool their coffee at this station where it is sorted, processed and sold as lots. As with almost all Ethiopian coffee, this is a mixed lot of heirloom varietals (several thousand varieties of coffee grow in Ethiopia… who wants to name them all???). Growing altitude is around 1800-2100masl and, as stated, this is a natural coffee, meaning the cherries are picked and sorted, then dried whole on raised beds like giant raisins. Eventually, the skins and fruit are removed to reveal the seeds (coffee “beans”) inside. Natural processing tends to give more body and fruitiness to coffees but can also come at the cost of ferment flavors, which some coffee drinkers don’t care for (but I love… the funkier and more ferment the better)! Bridge City Coffee gives us tasting notes of, “Berry, citrus, walnut.”
I am using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper. My Handground grinder is set to 3 and this is a dense coffee so it was a little slower than usual to brew. I get some nice floral aromas out of the cup, especially as it cools down a little. This is one of those coffees whose aroma I wish I could bottle and just smell all day long. Someone work on that for me, please! LOL There’s a good amount of citrus in the aroma, too, hopefully a promise of things to come in the sip. Konga’s reputation for bright citrus notes lives on in this coffee! Wow! For an Ethiopian natural, the flavors in this cup are really unexpected and in a blind tasting I think this one would trick me because it has so many flavors I’d expect from a washed Yirgacheffe. I’m usually darn good at identifying Ethiopian coffees in general, but especially naturals, so a sneaky one like this is fun to find!
Talk about stonefruit, too! Wow! There is a lot of peach and apricot notes in the sweetness of this cup. It really washes over my palate, hitting the sides of my tongue and cheeks especially, while the citrus acidity goes straight to the back of my tongue and upper throat. This is a very fruity coffee and, as such, bright, too, but those bright fruit flavors are soft and round at the same time. This coffee has a light-medium body and a tea-like mouthfeel, but the flavors are so intense that it has more presence than the mouthfeel lets on. The citrus acidity has a lot of tangerine, some of that tartness I would expect from apricot, maybe a hint of lemon candy. All that peach and apricot gives this coffee a really juicy, sweet vibe, though. It’s so good! If I hold the coffee in my mouth and really agitate it to get some retronasal action going, I get a very tiny ferment note, but this is definitely one of the cleanest naturals from Ethiopia that I’ve ever had. The ferment is almost imperceptible, even when actively looking for it. Yes, this coffee would definitely trick me in a blind tasting!
What a great cup! That’s 2 for 2 now with Bridge City Coffee! That Burundi was outstanding and now this Ethiopian is totally blowing my mind! It’s super fruity and it leans into the brightness of those fruits, yet balances it all out with great sweetness in the cup. Juicy, peachy, citrusy… man! I love this!