Uprising Coffee Ethiopia Djimma Gera Estate

We’re back to Africa via my new friends at New Jersey’s Uprising Coffee. Let’s start the week off right with a nice washed Ethiopian! Slurp slurp!

Uprising Coffee

Purchase this coffee directly for $17/12oz (or $5/4oz)

Uprising Coffee Brazil Cerrado review


UPRISING COFFEE ETHIOPIA DJIMMA GERA ESTATE

Matt Hall founded Uprising Coffee in central New Jersey (Hopewell) in 2015 and started roasting in earnest in early 2016. Uprising coffee can be found throughout the area at local markets and coffee shops and Matt has a cool DIY/punk mindset driving his brand. I really enjoyed his natural Cerrado from Brazil and so I’m excited to break into this washed Ethiopian coffee now. This coffee comes from the Gera Estate in the Djimma (Jimma… there are no right or wrong ways to spell Amharic words in English!), which sits at an altitude of 1800-2180masl! All the coffee growing on the estate is shade protected and they use no insecticides or herbicides in their production. Djimma is a city and a Zone in the southwest of Ethiopia, part of the enormous Oromia region.

Uprising Coffee gives us flavor notes of, “rich and sweet, milk chocolate, juicy pomegranate, well-balanced” for this cup, and recommends it as a filter, French press or espresso, making it very versatile. I’m focusing my review this morning on this Gera Estate coffee as a pourover. I used my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper. My Handground grinder was set to 3.

This gives me a nice, bright (yet also sweet) cup with a medium to medium-heavy body. This coffee is interesting and different right off the bat! It’s sweet and brightly fruited right at the beginning of the sip. I get a bit of a cranberry sauce vibe from my initial sips, but not really necessarily a cranberry flavor. Toward the middle of the sip, this coffee is all fruit… not really citrus, not really berries, although there is a hint of berry jam…. no stone fruits… I get a bit of raisin character, some stewed plums, a bit of cranberry, a bit of berry jam. Yum! This is not the usual fruitiness I get from Ethiopian coffees and it’s quite interesting and refreshing!

This coffee has a bit of a wine-like character for me, too. I know that’s not the best descriptor, but the way the sugars and the acids interact in this cup to be both sweet and also bright and fruity, especially leaning toward the darker red fruits, it has a solid wine-y vibe and flavor profile. As the cup cools I pick up some black sweet tea in second half of the sip that carries into the finish. The finish is neutral to just slightly dry, which lends toward that black tea character, too.

For me, this coffee is all about highlighting all those “red fruits” and yet it still has pretty good balance between fruity acidity and sweetness. It’s definitely a bright, fruit-forward cup, but there is a good base of sweetness to offset those fruits. This coffee is definitely a rulebreaker if I use the washed Yirgacheffes I’ve been drinking this year as a comparison, but SW Ethiopia is a totally different growing climate from Yirgacheffe, and it only makes sense that the coffee is going to reflect that. I love the mix of brightness and darker fruit flavors in this cup. It’s complex and unexpected but also sweet and fruity and delicious, too, making it quite drinkable given the complexity of the flavors I’m getting. Another awesome cup from Uprising!

2 Responses

  1. Nancy
    |

    Great review! I loved your focus on trying to pinpoint the fruity flavors, great writing!!