Happy Tuesday! I’m starting the day off with a washed Ethiopian coffee from New Jersey roaster, Uprising Coffee. Care to join me?
Purchase this coffee for $5/4oz, $18/12oz or $75/5lbs
Other reviews in this series: Uganda Kapchorwa
UPRISING COFFEE ETHIOPIA LIMU
Matt Hall began Uprising Coffee in the central New Jersey town of Hopewell in 2015. He uses a North Coffee Roaster and was fully built out and operational in his current space by the beginning of 2016. Uprising can be found in coffee shops, bakeries, grocery stores and restaurants throughout the area. The Ugandan coffee Matt sent me with this one was super sweet and just a joy to drink, so I have high hopes for this morning’s coffee, an Ethiopian from Limu!
This morning’s coffee is a fully washed coffee consisting of heirloom varieties grown around 1800-2200masl. The geography and nomenclature get a little confusing, so here goes! This coffee is grown in the Djimmah region of the west highlands of Sidamo. Traditionally, washed coffees from this part of Ethiopia are called “Limu” while natural process coffees retain the Djimmah name. Given how tiny most Ethiopian smallholder coffee plots are, in Djimmah they are relatively big, coming in at 2 hectares. Still tiny by global standards, though! Matt gives us tasting notes of, “Chocolate chip, raisin, bright and crisp with a smooth finish” and he recommends this coffee as filter, French press or espresso.
I’m using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin brewer with Kalita 155 filter. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind and this brew too 3:00 not including the bloom.
Diving right into this cup, I’m greeted by a light body with a honey-like sweetness anchoring the low end of this coffee. The cup reads right away as delicate and somewhat subtle, and I like that in a coffee. There’s even more sweetness coming in that reminds me of raisin and maybe a little bit of a fig note, too. This much sweetness in a coffee could be cloying, but in the second half of the sip the brightness kicks in to balance it all out. I’m getting some green grape and a delicate lemon candy acidity in this cup. It really is an overall very sweet cup, a lot like the Ugandan coffee that Uprising sent me, too. It’s nicely balanced and everything is super mellow in this cup… sweet, balanced, clean and delicious, and did I mention sweet? LOL The finish leans just to the sweet side of neutral on my palate and I get left with just a hint of dryness on my palate, which always reads as “tea like” to my brain, but there are not a lot of tea flavors in this coffee… this is more of a feel than a flavor note. As the cup cools the body seems to firm up toward medium and I get more orange and bergamot notes than lemon in some sips. Approaching room temp I’m getting blood orange and it’s really delicious and juicy, encouraging more and faster sips.
This is a really pleasant coffee to drink. It’s low-key, super easy drinking and sweet for days. Uprising’s roasting style seems to lean this direction, with Matt really seeming to coax out every molecule of sugar development with his roasting. So good!!!