Good morning and welcome to today’s review. I have another Tega & Tula Ethiopian lot from new-to-me roaster, Flatlands Coffee, so let’s slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $19.50/250g (8.8oz)
Coffee Brew Guides interview with Ben Vollmar
FLATLANDS COFFEE ETHIOPIA LIMU LOT 008
Flatlands Coffee appears to have gotten their start around late 2014 with a successful Kickstarter campaign.They started off with an emphasis on barista skills and being a multiroaster shop, carrying and serving coffee from other roasters. According to Daily Coffee News, it looks like the shop opened in later 2015 and that this campaign followed a previously unsuccessful one. Ben Vollmar had previous experience in coffee, wanting to own his own shop since high school, and his wife, Cassy, handled the design aspects of their shop in Bowling Green, Ohio, which has a sleek, modern look juxtaposing the 200 year old bricks on the walls. As with a lot of multiroaster shops, Flatlands developed their own preferences and, today, roasts their own coffee in a “Nordic” style (which is light) according to their website.
Flatlands sent me a bunch of their coffee to try and I fell in love right away just when I peeked in the box because they take “coffee geek” to a new level with their labels, which are very simple and clean but also very detailed. They also have all the info a homebrewing nerd could possibly want on their website, and that’s nice! I decided to jump into their Limu Lot 008 first (technically, “Limu 008/3A” on the package label) because this coffee is from Tega & Tula, a specialty coffee farm in the Limu region of Ethiopia and I tried a lot of their coffee from another roaster fairly recently, too, so I thought a comparison would be nice. Flatlands like this coffee so much they submitted it to the Golden Bean Awards and walked away with a Bronze Medal this year in the Pour Over Filter category! Congratulations!
This morning’s coffee is Flatlands’ Limu Lot 008, which is Wild Keffa and a bunch of numbered varietals like 75227 and 74165. The label lists 7 varietals in this lot altogether, imported by the famed Cafe Imports. This is a washed coffee and growing elevation is listed at 1693-1860masl. I received batch 136 roasted on 9/17/19. Flatlands gives us tasting notes of, “sugarcane, green grape, grapefruit, cocoa” on the label and adds “mango, lime, caramel” to the mix on the website description.
I’m using my usual pourover method for this coffee, which is a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin flat bottomed dripper with a Kalita 155 filter. I grind with a Knock Aergrind and pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. This coffee got a 32 second bloom and the total brew time, bloom included, was 3:20.
Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium-light bodied coffee and it’s as bright as a shimmering star in the dark night. I can almost taste the shimmer! LOL There is definitely a green grape and white grape soda sweetness to this cup. There is a lot to taste here so this is a coffee worth drinking slowly and contemplating each sip, but despite its complexity it’s still accessible and easy to drink. This coffee is all about the high notes and in the initial part of the sip I’m getting more of an orange or tangerine acidity and sweetness that hits the top and back of my tongue. In the mid sip, the sides of my tongue light up with more of that grape note and also a bit of grapefruit. The grapefruit in this coffee is pretty mellow, for me, much less than the aggressively grapefruit tones a Kenyan coffee may have. Imagine a cup of orange and tangerine juice with a squeeze of grapefruit, it’s more like that. There’s a grapefruit peel note in the second half of the sip and into the finish and aftertaste which tastes like the peel and pith of grapefruit, to me, with just a hint of the bitterness that comes with the real thing. This cup finishes sweet and if I can wait a while between sips (not easy!), it leaves a sugary coating on my tongue and palate like candy. At close to room temperature, I’m picking up nice hits of lime acidity, which I love. This coffee just tastes fresh and bright and it’s a nice contrast to the warm days of early Autumn that we’ve been having. This coffee has great balance and just like with the Bespoken version I reviewed a week or two ago, despite it being a bright, acid-forward cup, it’s not harsh, it’s not “acidic” in the sense that a lot of people use the term and it’s a nice drinker with lots of intense flavors.