I was out of town for four days for a research conference and while the hotel coffee was actually above average for commodity-grade coffee, I am super excited to be back home and trying out this natural Ethiopian from Sunergos Coffee! Slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly starting at $11/8oz
SUNERGOS COFFEE ETHIOPIA IDIDO
Sunergos Coffee has been a mainstay in the Louisville, Kentucky specialty coffee community since 2003, which makes them a bit of an OG in American specialty coffee altogether, really! My experience with Sunergos has been well-sourced beans with excellent roasting, and what more can we ask for from a roaster? As a cafe, Sunergos has 4.5-5 star ratings across the board on all the major food/bev rating platforms, so their customer service must be equally as righteous!
This morning I am having a look at Sunergos’s Ethiopia Idido, one of two current Ethiopian selections from the company (look out for the other review late this week). This is a natural process coffee consisting of heirloom varieties grown around 1798-1996masl by farmers organized around the Idido mill. This is located near Yirgacheffe, the apocryphal birthplace of coffee. This is the typical coffee processing setup in Ethiopia, where farms tend to be very small, so farmers work with a co-op to pool their coffee and sell it as larger collective lots. This is a light city roast and Sunergos gives us aroma notes of, “blueberry, jasmine, honey, citrus” and flavor notes of, “blueberry, honey, floral, tea, bourbon.” Natural coffees are picked and sorted by hand, then laid out on elevated mesh beds to dry slowly, being turned every 2-3 hours throughout the process. Think of big raisins. As the fruit of the coffee cherries breaks down, they tend to pass on fruity flavors to the seeds inside, which we call coffee beans. I personally love natural coffees, so I’m always excited to drink them!
I am using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 28g of coffee to 450g of Third Wave Water in a notNeutral Gino dripper. I use Kalita 185 filters and a Knock Aergrind for grinding duties. This coffee does have a beautifully floral aroma. I get a little berry, lots of jasmine and some citrus that reminds me, overall, of Earl Grey tea. Taking some sips, I’d call this a medium-light bodied coffee. It has a dry finish and an overall pretty dry presence on my palate throughout the sip, but sometimes coffees will open up a little as they cool, so I’ll check back in on this. Right up front I get a lot of blueberry and raspberry in the sip followed by a light amount of citrus acidity. The acidity has a hint of lemon peel but really leans more toward orange or tangerine, although it’s definitely not the main player in this cup. It definitely gives a bergamot vibe and lends a lot to the overall tea-like nature of this coffee.
Lots of florals are intertwined in all of these flavor notes throughout the sip. The finish is very dry on this coffee and in the long aftertaste the acidity is a bit more lemony on my palate. This coffee is somewhat unique in that it’s usually the washed coffees from this region that give me a lot of the tea-like, Earl Grey notes, and today I’m finding all of this in a natural. The dryness on my palate really clinches the similarity of this coffee to tea. This is one of the driest cups of coffee I’ve had in a long time and while it doesn’t take away from the flavor for me, it leaves my tongue and palate feeling almost like they’re coated in Velcro and it’s taking away from the drinkability of this coffee, for me. Overall, the flavors in this cup are really nice, and I enjoyed the cup, but the only drawback was the dryness. A little bit of dryness on my palate is no big deal for me and even this coffee is not a deal-breaker by any stretch of the imagination, but it was substantially dry for me and that did reduce the drinkability and accessibility of this coffee for me. That being said, the flavors are nice and it’s well-balanced. I’m going to be experimenting some with this as a single origin espresso, too, so keep your eye on my Instagram for updates on that!