Edison Roasting Co. Ethiopia Kochere

 

EdisonKochere

I rave about MyCoffeePub subscriptions every month. Yes, they have an ad on the website, but that’s not why I think they’re cool. I’m not the biggest lover of surprises, but over the past year I have really come to enjoy when my box from MyCoffeePub is sitting on the doorstep waiting for me when I get home. You never know what the selection is going to be until you open it up and while that may stress some people out, I’ve come to love it because the gang at MyCoffeePub pick really good coffees. What’s even better is getting to discover new roasters. I figured I was following everybody on one social media platform or another, but this month I’ve learned about a roaster I was totally unaware of, Edison Roasting Company. MyCoffeePub selected Edison’s Kochere from Ethiopia as this month’s coffee. If you’re a MyCoffeePub member you can buy bags for $16.95 and get free shipping. If you aren’t a member, you just have to pay the shipping. Here’s the link. You can also order this coffee directly from Edison Roasting Co. for $15.95.

Today’s coffee is a Grade 1 natural from the Kochere woreda, located in the Gedeo zone of Ethiopia. Unless you are really up to speed on your geography, Kochere is considered a small microregion of Yirgacheffe, the famed “coffee city” of Ethiopia. A lot of coffee is grown around there and they’re amazingly all different from one another. Some other familiar names from the area that you may recognize are Ch’elelek’tu, Adado and Konga. The farms in the area are small, usually around five hectares, and so coffee farmers in Ethiopia are members of a cooperative where they pool their coffee, sort and process it all together and sell it in lots on a market exchange system. This particular coffee comes from 1900-2200masl and like all Ethiopian coffees, it’s comprised of heirloom varietals. Ethiopia is famous for being the “birthplace of coffee” and it is estimated that there are between 6,000 and 10,000 varieties of coffee existing naturally in the highlands of the country! So, we’re happy to call them “heirloom!” Edison gives us tasting notes of, “Blueberry, caramelized peach” on the bag and their website has, “strawberry, raspberry, rich chocolate brownie.” I got a little bit of most of both descriptions in my cups.

Edison Bag Detail Texas

Considering I just learned about Edison Roasting Co. myself, I don’t know a lot about them. They are located in Lewisville, Texas which is in the Dallas metro area, just north of the city. Looking at Edison’s Instagram, it appears that they just opened their brick and mortar shop yesterday (5/19/16), so congratulations to them! What an undertaking! Let’s take a closer look at this coffee now.

I prepared my samples using two methods, my usual pourover and Brian Beyke’s Stubby recipe for Aeropress. Brian’s recipe reads a little complicated, but it’s not bad once you do it a couple times. I don’t know why but recipes always seem “gimmicky” to me but this one is legit. Surprisingly, these methods yielded two quite different cups. For pourover, I used my notNeutral Gino with Kalita 185 filters and a 1:16 ratio, using 28g of coffee and 450g of water with a total brew time of around 3:45.

Pourover:
From the Gino pourover, I got cups full of really pleasant floral aromas. There was a little peach in the aroma, too, but it was floral and sweet and sweetly floral! Did I mention floral? In the cups, the flavors were a bit subtle and restrained for a natural, but there was nice complexity and quite a bit to pull apart. There was a hint of sweet lemon to the acidity and the floral notes carried over into the flavor, too. Medium body with a nice aftertaste that was, again, floral and a bit spicy. I was able to appreciate some very subtle peachy notes and they seemed to come with just a hint of tartness, like a peach that was a day or two from being fully ripe. I didn’t really get any blueberry from this coffee but I did get hints of raspberry and blackberry. I’ve been eating blackberries almost everyday for the past few weeks and they have this beautiful floral component I never realized until recently, so with all the floral notes in the coffee “blackberry” jumped right out, for me. This coffee seemed really “fresh” for lack of a better word to me, and I’ll bet it would make a good cold brew, too. For a natural, I found it restrained and even delicate, but no less enjoyable than the blueberry atom bombs that lured so many of us into specialty coffee years ago!

Stubby Aeropress Recipe:
Based on my few experiences with Brian’s Stubby recipe, I expected the lemon brightness in this coffee to really pop with the Aeropress, which it didn’t. I also expected the florals to come up even more, which they didn’t. LOL I was batting 0 for 2, but that’s OK. It did make a pretty nice cup. The florals were quite muted using this recipe, but they did show up in the aftertaste and added some complexity there. The berries were accentuated by this recipe, though, getting a bit of strawberry, a bit of the blackberry I mentioned earlier and the raspberry flavors were particularly more noticeable. The body was about the same, and while enjoyable, I certainly liked the pourover better in this case.

Overall, this is a nice, simple, pleasing coffee. I didn’t get any ferment notes from this one, which in a natural is unusual. Personally, I usually like the flavors that come from a good fermentation in a natural coffee, even to the extremes as with Miersch’s Funky Naturals! I think this was a good choice for MyCoffeePub because I can’t imagine too many people not liking this coffee. It’s a natural and has nice flavors we associate with Ethiopian natural processing, but it’s not overly fermented, too sweet nor does it have any of the other qualities that people usually point out when they say they don’t like naturals. It has a mostly clean flavor profile with a lot of the subtleties of washed Ethiopian coffees, too. This one has to be a crowd-pleaser! Congratulations to Edison on their new shop and their roasting venture and I hope to try some more of their offerings once they’re steady on their feet. This is a nice coffee and I have a ton of Ethiopians following in it’s wake, so it’ll fun to compare them all in upcoming reviews!