Roast House Coffee Ethiopia Homacho Waeno

I’ve been super-impressed with Roast House Coffee’s Kenya Karimikui AA and No Limits 2.0 espresso from Colombia. YUM! We’re back in Africa this morning with their Homach Waeno from Ethiopia. No time to waste, let’s slurp!

Roast House Coffee

Purchase this coffee directly for $11/8oz or $19/16oz 

Roast House Kenya Karimikui AA review

Roast House No Limits 2.0 Espresso review


ROAST HOUSE COFFEE ETHIOPIA HOMACHO WAENO (LIMITED RELEASE)

Roast House Coffee has been making a name for themselves since it was founded in Spokane, Washington in 2010 by Deborah Di Bernardo. Sourcing good coffee and being active members of their community has been Roast House’s mission and, judging by their rabid following, they’re doing a fine job of living up to that mission. That brings us around to this coffee, Homacho Waeno. Homacho Weano is growers cooperative in Ethiopia that is part of the much larger Sidamo Coffee Farmer’s Cooperative Union. Ethiopian coffee farms are usually very small, so farmers join cooperatives to pool coffee and resources. The co-ops own the coffee “factories” where the coffee is collected, sorted and processed. This is the first year Roast House has worked with Hamacho Waeno, although they’ve undoubtedly purchased a lot of coffee from Sidamo in the past!

This is a washed coffee comprised of any of the thousands of heirloom varieties growing in Ethiopia today. Growing altitude is around 2100masl there. Roast House gave this selection a “light” roast and say to expect, “watermelon, ripe red raspberry, homemade lemonade and fresh cut lavendar” from this coffee. I used my standard pourover method to prepare my cups… 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 preparations.

There is a floral note in the aroma of this coffee along with a “green” cut-stem note, too. It promises something vibrant and refreshing in this cup, which is just what I’m hoping for with this heat wave we’ve been having in Kansas City! I am greeted with a medium-light bodied coffee that has a lemon candy acidity right up front along with some raspberry fruity notes. The lemon acidity is vibrant but balanced by sweetness in this cup and it quickly shifts to a pink bubblegum flavor in the mid-sip! It has been a long time since I’ve tasted bubblegum in a coffee, but here it is! The aftertaste drops off relatively quickly and leaves behind a slightly floral tone with a raspberry finish, for sure. Raspberry is very apparent to me in this cup but it’s somehow different (cleaner, more subtle?) than it is in a raspberry-forward Ethiopian natural. I am not picking up on watermelon, per se, but I am getting a melon-like sweetness from this cup and a bit of mixed melon flavors in the aftertaste. I don’t want to say cantaloupe or honeydew, either, because it’s none of them, specifically, yet there is a clean, fresh sweetness that reminds me of melons, even if I can’t pin the flavor on a specific type.

What a delicious cup! I’m usually not an iced/cold coffee kind of guy, but I think I’m going to make a to-go of this using the Japanese iced coffee method in my Chemex before I leave the house this morning. I’ll bet this coffee will be killer made that way, too. Another very nicely roasted winner from Roast House!