MyCoffeePub finished strong with December 2018’s selection being from Brandywine Coffee Roasters. This is their current natural from Ethiopia, so let’s ring in the New Year with one of 2018’s last coffees!
Purchase this coffee directly for $18/12oz.
MYCOFFEEPUB DEC. 2018: BRANDYWINE COFFEE ROASTERS ETHIOPIA BILOYA NATURAL
I’ve been working with MyCoffeePub for several years now and it’s still a highlight of the month to see what’s in the package I get monthly from them. MCP’s subcription is easy. Sign up, get a bag of coffee every month. In about 3 years of working with MyCoffeePub they’ve never sent anything bad out and they have a good mix of new roasteries and better known names, too. It’s a nice surprise every month and you don’t have to manage your subscription, make difficult choices about which coffee you want or anything else. Set it and forget it, like Ron Popeil!
December 2018’s MCP coffee selection was Brandywine Coffee Roasters’ Ethiopia Biloya natural. Brandywine Coffee Roasters have been featured on KC Coffee Geek in the past, but it has been a while. Brandywine is probably best known for their branding and awesome coffee labels, which are drawn and screenprinted in-house and feature a cool wax stamp on every bag, but what’s inside the bag is always darn good, too! Brandywine Coffee Roasters was founded in 2015 and named after the Brandywine River valley that Wilmington, Delaware sits in. Brandywine’s founder also owns the Brew Haha! chain of cafes in Wilmington.
The coffee MyCoffeePub selected for December is Brandywine’s Ethiopia Biloya natural. Biloya is a washing station located in Yirgacheffe. Most commonly in Ethiopia, smallholder farmers with very small farm plots work in cooperatives centered around washing stations. Harvested coffee is brought to the central washing station where it is combined into lots and processed. This is a natural process (aka dry process) coffee, which means the coffee is laid out to dry in the sun with the coffee cherries intact, like big raisins. This imparts sweetness and fruitiness, and can also lead to some fermentation notes, to the seeds inside the coffee cherries, what we refer to as coffee “beans.” Coffees processed at Biloya are grown in the 1700-2000masl range.
I am using my standard pourover method for this coffee, which is a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water. I’m using a Trinity Origin brewer and a Melodrip to control the pour. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind.
Brandywine offers tasting notes of, “strawberry, white grape, candied ginger, raspberry” for this coffee and it sounds amazing. Taking a sip, this coffee registers as being on the lighter side of medium in terms of body, but it also has a heavier-than-expected mouthfeel that has a dairy-like quality for me. How a coffee can have light-ish body but a creamy mouthfeel, I’ll never know, but Biloya does what Biloya wants! LOL
As far as Ethiopian naturals go, this coffee is quite subtle. White grape is a great call by Brandywine for this coffee. The front of the sip has a ton of white grape (think of white grape soda without the bubbles) that carries throughout the rest of the sip. I’m getting some raspberry notes up front, too, and also in the finish of the coffee. In the middle of the sip I’m picking up a little more of a strawberry note, but the berries, for my palate, are not hit-me-over-the-head as they often are in a natural Ethiopian coffee, and I don’t mind that. If I hold the coffee in my mouth and get some air agitating out my nose (retronasal tasting) I get a ton of sweetness and some milk chocolate notes that I’m getting more in my sinuses than from my mouth. This cups definitely leans toward sweet rather than balanced, although it’s not so “out of balance” that it’s cloying. The brightness in this cup comes from those same fruity notes that give this coffee all its sweetness, so it’s hard to separate the two. This coffee finishes sweet with a little bittersweet chocolate in the end that carries into the long aftertaste. For me, the ferment notes in this coffee are minimal. I personally don’t mind a funky, fermenty natural coffee, but I know ferment bothers some coffee drinkers and turns them off of naturals. This is a pretty clean-tasting coffee, in my opinion.
In short, this is a total winner! Beautiful flavors, sweet throughout with some complexity. This coffee is super-drinkable, especially as the temperature drops to lukewarm, where this coffee really shines. This must be what the Narwhals on the bag art are so excited about! Happy New Year, celebrate with a MyCoffeePub subscription and a visit to spend your holiday money on some Brandywine Coffee Roasters coffees (you’ll need some frames to display the bags later, too, so factor that in!).