Broom Wagon Coffee Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Buufata Konga

I always love the surprise of finding out what’s inside the My Coffee Pub subscription mailer every month and this month I opened the package and saw a big, red polka dot and knew who the roaster was right away… Broom Wagon Coffee from Charleston, SC, with a coffee “dressed” in one of their Tour de France jersey-themed bags! Let’s check it out!

Broom Wagon Coffee

My Coffee Pub

Buy this coffee directly for $19/12oz ($3 shipping or free with orders over $30)

Excellent article in the Post and Courier about Broom Wagon and Charleston’s coffee scene


MY COFFEE PUB JUNE 2017: BROOM WAGON COFFEE ETHIOPIA YIRGACHEFFE BUUFATA KONGA

My Coffee Pub is a simple subscription service… you sign up, they send you one bag of coffee every month. I’ve been a subscriber for well over a year, going on two years, now, and their choices are always well-done and I’m never disappointed by what the MCP guys select. They have great taste and I absolutely love the little surprise I get of opening the mailer in the middle of every month! This month’s roaster is Broom Wagon Coffee from Charleston, SC. Broom Wagon Coffee takes advantage of the deep coffee and bicycling tradition from their name through their aesthetic. Jeremias and Rachel Paul named Broom Wagon Coffee after the voiture balai or “broom wagon” that made its first appearance in the 1910 Tour de France cycling race. The “broom wagon” was, and still is, a vehicle that would follow the race and “sweep up” riders and their bikes after injuries, mechanical problems that stopped them or after being dropped during a bad day of racing. The Pauls expand on this branding further with their cool logo that is reminiscent of a bicycle head badge and their TdF-inspired bags, which are themed after the iconic race leader jerseys. Today’s coffee is adorned in the red polka dots of the “King of the Mountains,” the Tour de France points leader in the grueling mountain stages of the race. Enough about bicycling, though, let’s drink some coffee!

This selection is a natural process coffee (dried in-cherry, like big raisins) that comes from the Buufata Konga mill in Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia, the literal birthplace of coffee. The coffee is a lot made up of heirloom varietals (there are many thousands of varieties growing in Ethiopia!) grown in the 1900-2100masl range. Broom Wagon gives us flavor notes of, “strawberry and peach… yet, it finishes with the sweet spices of ginger, cinnamon and cardamom.” Coffee Shrub, Broom Wagon’s source for this coffee, rated it a 93, which is a high score for any coffee, especially a natural. Read all about this coffee here!

I used my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of water in a notNeutral Gino dripper. My Handground grinder was set to 3 and I used Third Wave Water in my preparation, as always. The cup has a body that falls on the lighter side of medium for me with fresh strawberry notes right up front in the sip. A lot of peach flavor and “feel” (that slightly dry feeling of eating a peach with the skin on) come in mid-sip and into the finish. There is definitely a peach iced tea vibe in this cup, with a bit of tea-like dryness on my palate, too. The peach note sticks around through the aftertaste and if I didn’t know better I’d swear I’d just eaten a peach because it’s that noticeable, to me, between sips of this coffee!

The perceived acidity in this cup is quite low, for me, although both the strawberry and peach notes brighten this cup. There’s a hint of lemon in the second half of the sip and in the finish and aftertaste, but really, the brightness is from the fruitiness in this cup and I can’t really separate out a particular acidity profile more than I already have. There is some milk chocolate in the cup, too, evoking images of chocolate covered strawberries in this cup. This is a very clean and fresh cup considering it is a natural process, and the ferment is minimal in this example. This is a stunner! Fruity and sweet, clean, structured… what more can I ask for in an Ethiopian natural?! There are so many familiar flavor notes in this coffee that make this coffee very inviting and accessible. Love it!