I found Meta Coffee Lab, based out of Lincoln, Nebraska (and not to be confused with Kansas City’s Meta Coffee Roasting Company which started right around the same time) via Instagram. All my Instafriends seem to be either coffee people or Japanese Chihuahuas, and that’s works out pretty well for me! LOL
Meta Coffee Lab got their official start in 2015, but co-founder Mike Bratty has been roasting coffee since 2006. They offer roasted coffee beans and nitrogenated cold brew at the Haymarket Farmers Market in Lincoln and with the summer we had in the Midwest this year I can only imagine Mike and his wife and copartner, Suzanne, were very busy! Mike and Suzanne make their cold brew with a toddy and then nitro charge it in kegs and serve it out of their very awesome custom tricycle![ref]http://www.metacoffeelab.com/#!about/c1bea[/ref] If I had that setup one tap would have coffee on it and the other would be an IPA, undoubtedly. LOL But that’s another story…
The first coffee I’m reviewing from Meta Coffee Lab is their Yirgacheffe Buna Abada from Ethiopia. “Buna Abada” means “floral coffee” in Amharic, the language of Ethiopia. Meta offered descriptors of, “Floral, citrus & stone fruit, rose water” for this coffee. At the time I wrote this review, there was not an active link to buy this coffee from Meta Coffee Lab, but I’m sure if you contact Mike and Suzanne they would be happy to help you get some of their coffee into your cup!
I tried this coffee as a Gino pourover as well as on AeroPress and I enjoyed it significantly more as an inverted AeroPress. As the coffee cooled, I liked it more and more, too, so this is one you’ll want to sit with and be patient drinking. In fact, at normal drinking temperatures I was pretty underwhelmed, but the cooler it got the better it got, all the way to room temp, which is pretty chilly on this mid-October morning!
This one has nice body for a washed Ethiopian coffee and the cup is sweet, overall. At warmer temperature there was a drying, pithy bitterness in the flavor that disappeared at cooler temperatures. There is some nice, round acidity that brightens up the cup and that I would put into the “apple” category as far as acidity goes. Lots of florals in the warmer cup that dissipated as it cooled, but there was a cinnamon-y/spicy character that replaced it that I really liked. There was a hint of cinnamon on the long aftertaste, too.
At warmer temps I got elements of honeydew melon in the aftertaste but as the cup cooled and opened up I began to notice more of a peach tone to the sweetness, which I always enjoy.
I’m glad I am a patient coffee drinker and always taste from immediately brewed until it’s stone cold because this coffee really benefitted from a cooler temp. It opened up a lot and was quite delicious once it found the temperature range it liked! I’ll bet this one would do pretty nicely on that rad nitro trike that Meta Coffee Lab has!