Happy Wednesday! I’m back with another Ethiopian coffee, this time from Virginia Beach roaster, Jolly Roasters Coffee Co. I was a big fan of their Guatemalan selection that I reviewed last week, and Ethiopian coffees have been fantastic this year, so let’s get right to it with this one!
Purchase this coffee directly for $17/12oz
Jolly Roasters Coffee Co. Guatemala Atitlan review
JOLLY ROASTERS COFFEE CO. ETHIOPIA YIRGACHEFFE
Casey and Brenda Jolly founded Jolly Roasters Coffee Co. in Virginia Beach, Virginia, after discovering specialty/”third wave” coffee while stationed in Japan. Falling instantly in love with Japanese pourovers, they did what a lot of us do and started roasting their own coffee using a popcorn popper, and people liked what they tasted. Since 2015, the Jollys have been busy with online sales, local pop-ups, farmers markets and tasting events, setting up wholesale accounts and doing all those fun things that it takes to get their product in people’s mouths! Kudos to them, running your own business is hard work and you’ll almost never have as bad of a boss as yourself! LOL
This morning’s coffee is Jolly Roasters’ Yirgacheffe from Ethiopia. Their website is easy to navigate but a little light on some of the geekier details (which is fine by me, it lets me experience the coffee with as few biases as possible…). As such, I have no altitude, growers’ co-op, etc to share with you. We know Ethiopian coffees are always a mix of heirloom varieties coming into co-op processing “factories” from many smallholder farmers in the area to be sorted and either dried in-cherry (natural) or pulped and washed. Generally, coffee grows around 1900-2200masl in this area. That’s a pretty good start. This coffee is a washed coffee, too, which I could tell looking at the beans and using a few other cues from my nose and tastebuds. This bodes well because washed Yirgacheffes have been fantastic this year!
Jolly Roasters gives us tasting notes of, “sweet peach, lime, light and crisp” and this is right in line with what I’ve been tasting in most of these washed Yirgs this year, too. I am using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of water in a notNeutral Gino dripper with a Handground grinder set to 3 and Third Wave Water for the brewing.
I’m met with a coffee with a medium body and a nice, silky mouthfeel. This is a peach bomb! There is a ton of peach sweetness and flavor notes (think ripe, yellow peaches) with some hint of apricot tartness along the “edges” of this flavor. Man, this one is really peachy and that’s my jam (no pun intended). Actually, with this amount of sweetness this coffee has similarities with a peach jam/jelly. The apricot/peach peel tartness creates a nice counterpoint to all that sweetness and a sense of acidity. There is a soft lime note in the top end, too, but lime is usually associated with a shot of bitterness, for my palate, and that’s minimal with this coffee.
Overall, this is a really simple, straightforward coffee and it’s excellent. It’s an easy drinker, sweet, balanced, clean, delicious, very pleasing in every way.