Good morning and happy Tuesday! Let’s celebrate the start of a new week with a honey process Ethiopian coffee from our friends at Máquina Coffee Roasters! Yum!
Máquina Coffee Roasters website
Purchase this coffee directly for $17/12oz with free shipping!
Other reviews in this series: Rwanda Kanyege
MÁQUINA COFFEE ROASTERS ETHIOPIA SEMALO PRIDE HONEY
A couple of years ago, Gabe Boscana and his family moved from the San Francisco bay area to a small town outside of Philadelphia, West Chester. Gabe was a 16+ year veteran of the coffee industry at that time, eager to do his own thing and start his own roasting company. Gabe previously worked for Gimme! Coffee, Sightglass, Ritual, Intelligentsia and Paramo, which is a resume worthy of taking note! I’ve found Gabe does an excellent job with sourcing and roasting his coffees, and the cool aesthetics of having one of the best logos in coffee doesn’t hurt the delivery of his product to us coffee geeks!
This morning, I am taking a taste of Máquina’s Ethiopia Semalo Pride Honey. And, this is coffee, not honey! LOL This coffee comes from Pride Mill, which is only in its second year of production. This mill is found at the base of Mount Lato Samalo and sits at around 2155 meters above sea level. This mill sits in between half the coffee-famous named places in Ethiopia at 20km from Chelektu Village in the Gelana Abaya district. It also borders the famed Kochere district with Reko Mountain visible from the mill, and it’s smack dab in the Yirgacheffe region, the apocyphal birthplace of coffee. The bag says the producer is Firewoyne Tesfaye and this is Karume and Tulenge varieties processed at the Pride Mill. This is a honey process coffee, which in my opinion, is rare for Ethiopia. Honey processing is an in-between process between washed and natural processing types.
After the coffee cherries are picked, they are sorted like naturals, sometimes dry fermented for a day or two while they cherries are still intact, but like a washed coffee, they are run through a depulper to break the skins and expose the goopy insides of the coffee cherries. From this point, washed coffees are fermented in water tanks to completely remove all that goop, but in honey processing, the goopy mucilage, or “honey,” is left on the cherry seeds (what we call coffee beans) and they are laid out on elevated mesh beds in all their sticky glory to slowly dry. Honey processing gives some of the sweetness, fruitiness and body expected of a natural process coffee while also going for a clean, low-ferment flavor cup. Gabe gives us tasting notes of, “Honeysuckle, chamomile, sweet” for this coffee, and adds, “This coffee is incredible. Trust us.”
I am using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin with a Kalita 155 filter. I’m using a Knock Aergrind to grind and this brew took 4:10 including a 30 second bloom, so it ran a little slow thanks to the dense Ethiopian beans.
With two flowers in the flavor profile from Máquina, as you’d expect, I did get some floral notes in the aroma from this cup, but it was surprisingly less floral smelling than a lot of Ethiopian coffees I’ve had recently. There is definitely a delicate, gentle floral aroma, though. Taking a sip, I get a medium-bodied coffee that’s bright up front with a citrus tone that builds to the midsip and then reveals a lot of complexity in the second half of the cup. And the chamomile mentioned on the bag? Yeah, it’s definitely in here! I don’t know that I’ve ever gotten chamomile in coffee before, but it’s here in the second half of the sip and it lingers for a long time in the aftertaste, too.
Backing up, there is a nice syrupy light caramel sweetness to this coffee that sticks with the whole sip from beginning to end. This is a really nice sweet base for this coffee and it reminds me of one of those Sugar Daddy caramel lollipops. Quickly following this sweet base there are a lot of lemon-lime notes that come into play. The acidity in this cup is not quite lemon, not quite lime… this coffee really has both, with hints of lemon candy that are expected in washed Ethiopian coffees but with a bit of a bitterness that I always associate with lime. This acidic aspect of the coffee is really nice. It plays perfectly off the caramel sweetness and complements it perfectly. That hint of lime bitterness is a perfect vehicle in the second half of the sip for the chamomile to come in, where it does in a subtle but still very noticeable way, for my palate. Chamomile tea is, of course, the essence of chamomile flowers, but it always has a little bit of bitterness, too. The chamomile floral flavors play off the lime bitterness perfectly and carry me into the slightly sweet finish and complex aftertaste of this cup. The aftertaste has the feeling of candy on my palate (that thickened saliva that clings to the back of my tongue and throat) but, at the same time there is a ton of chamomile and black tea in the aftertaste to temper that candy-like sweetness.
Gabe wasn’t kidding, this is an incredible coffee and I do trust him! LOL A total winner in every way for me. This coffee has a bit of the familiarity of a good washed coffee from Ethiopia, but that chamomile really sets it apart and ties all the flavors together from beginning to end. This is a complex cup that retains its drinkability, but is also very unique. I love it! c