Dagger Mountain Roastery Ethiopia Limu Gera

Dagger Mountain Limu Gera

After a series of kitchen plumbing nightmares that were causing backups into my basement, I finally am getting caught up with posting reviews! Today we’re taking a look at Dagger Mountain Roastery’s Limu Gera, a washed Ethiopian coffee. You can buy this coffee directly from my friends in Valparaiso, Indiana for $16/12oz bag!

Gera is near the coffee-growing city of Limu, found in western Ethiopia. The area is well-known for both natural and washed coffees like this one. Like most of the coffees from Ethiopia, it is a mix of heirloom varieties collected from members of a co-op, combined and sorted, and then sold in lots on the Ethiopian Coffee Exchange, so it’s hard to track these back to particular farms or microlots. This coffee was grown in the 1850-1900masl range and is fully washed. Dagger Mountain suggests flavors of, “Lemon candy, creme brulee, black tea.” As always, I used my usual 1:15 ratio of coffee to water in a notNeutral Gino dripper using Kalita 185 white filters and a 4:00-ish total brew time.

I got rather excited seeing the flavor description of this Ethiopian coffee from Dagger Mountain. It seems like it has been a while since I’ve had what I consider a more traditional style washed Ethiopian coffee that was light, lemony and tea-like. One of my first really mind-blowing coffee moments was one such coffee that, if I’d tasted it blind I wouldn’t sworn was Earl Grey tea and not even coffee! For quite some time I didn’t even care that much for washed Ethiopian coffees because of the light body and heavy tea and lemon notes, but sometime in the last year my palate did a 180° and now I love them! Go figure.

This Limu Gera from Dagger Mountain is a beautiful coffee. It has pleasant and soft, yet bright, lemon-lime acidity. At first the acidity seemed sweeter and more lemony, like the lemon candy noted on the bag, but as it cooled it picked up a little bitterness, which I rather enjoyed, the and the tone of the acidity shifted more toward lime for me, which I always associate with a hint of bitterness, too.

This coffee has a medium-light body with a creamy mouthfeel and despite the obvious acidity, it is sweet throughout with a sweet finish. The creme brulee descriptor on the bag is spot-on! The sweetness of this cup has a creamy, milky tone to it. Mixed with the light bitterness from the acidity, which I can get from the caramelized crust of a creme brulee, this really correlates strongly to that dessert for me! Yum!

This isn’t quite as tea-like as some other washed Ethiopian coffees I’ve had, but there is a bit of a tea note in the long aftertaste. I sort of like my coffee to taste like coffee, of course, but there is a hint of “green,” … maybe a slight herbal quality in the latter half of the sip that calls back to tea. It’s subtle, for sure.

I really enjoyed this coffee. It’s complex yet clean and structured, exactly how I like washed Ethiopian coffee. It’s sweet yet bright and balanced and it’s just a delicious coffee to start the day with.