Good morning and welcome to today’s review of Flatlands Coffee’s Bedhatu Jibicho, a natural coffee from Ethiopia. Slurp!
Other reviews in this series: Ethiopia Limu Lot 008 | Brazil Fazenda Santuario Sul | Colombia La Union | Mexico El Triunfo
FLATLANDS COFFEE ETHIOPIA BEDHATU JIBICHO
Flatlands Coffee is based in Bowling Green, Ohio and got their start in late 2014. Ben Vollmar, and his wife, Cassy, opened a shop in 2015. As an interior designer, Cassy also designed the aesthetics of the shop, which looks warm and inviting, yet modern. The early emphasis of the cafe was on training top baristas (in 2019, they had multiple baristas qualify to comptete in the US Barista Championships) and sourcing the best coffees from American roasters. Over time, Flatlands developed a taste of what they like in coffee and started roasting their own. This run of coffees has been my first taste of Flatlands Coffee and it has been exceptional, so they have quickly risen to the “buy anything from them and it will be good” status here at KC Coffee Geek!
You can see if you scoped the date on the bag in the photo for this review that I’ve been way behind on getting some things posted, so this coffee is either sold out or out of rotation, but it’s a testament to good coffee roasted well, so I want to share my story with you anyway and build the narrative we’ve discovered about Flatlands’ excellence! Bedhatu Jibicho has been producing coffee for over 50 years, ever since the Ethiopian government gave her husband land in the 1960’s. He passed away in 1991 and Bedhatu continued to manage operations and oversee her coffee from flower to bagging for export! Bedhatu’s farm is 84 acres and she has never used chemicals on her coffee. She employs 20 full time workers and 130 seasonal workers. This is a big farm by most Ethiopian coffee farm standards, and Bedhatu has a lot of pull with the Banko Gotiti coffee cooperative, who allow her to process her coffee separately. Most coffee in Ethiopia comes from tiny smallholder farm plots and the coffee is combined into larger lots at the co-op. It’s pretty rare to get traceable coffee in Ethiopia, so it’s always a treat to get coffees like this one from Flatlands, which represents the hard work of one farm! Bedhatu’s farm is located in the Gedeb District of Ethiopia’s Gedeo Zone and coffee grows at 1800-1900masl there. This is a natural coffee, meaning it’s picked and sorted, then the whole, intact coffee cherries are laid out whole on raised beds in the sun where they slowly break down like big raisins, imparting body, sweetness and fruity flavors to the seeds inside. These cherry seeds are what we call coffee “beans.”
I’ve been using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with a Kalita 155 filter and pulse pouring through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee during brewing. This coffee brewed in the 3:35-3:55 range including a 30 second bloom of the grounds.
The dry fragrance on these coffee grounds has a lot of Frankenberry and Booberry cereal notes, for me. I get quite a bit of both in the aroma from the brewed coffee, too, as well as hints of blackberry (which for me is a berry aroma or flavor with extra brightness, like a splash of lemon almost) and a good amount of Watermelon Jolly Rancher. Taking a sip, I’d call this a medium-light bodied coffee with a delicate presence on my palate. There is honey-like sweetness on the low end of the cup, balancing out a lot of fruit and a decent amount of acidity and brightness here. On the high note side of things, I’m getting a lot of orange, which for my palate is unusual with an Ethiopian coffee, especially a natural, as they tend to run strongly toward lemon citrus acidity or on the lime end of things. This orange note is obvious, but still feels delicate to me, so I’d go so far as to call it orange blossom, even. I’m getting a little bit of a jasmine floral hint here and not much, if any, of the watermelon Jolly Rancher I was picking up in the aroma. Ethiopian naturals are well known for their berry notes and I’m getting a healthy amount of blackberry here, although this flavor is running more in the background. I do get a lot of blackberry in the lingering aftertaste in this coffee. Naturals can turn some coffee drinkers off because of a perception of rotten notes or even “trash” or “garbage” in the flavors, which is how these unfortunate folks’ brains perceive the fermentation notes that often make it into the beans during the break down process of the cherry fruits surrounding them. I personally don’t get negative connotations from fermentation notes in coffee and quite enjoy them, but I can say this coffee has little, if any, ferment in it for my palate and brain.
This is a delicious, inviting, easily accessible coffee from Flatlands that is expertly roasted to keep a lot of origin characteristics and nuance in it. An exceptional coffee handled just right… what more can we ask for? I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get my review to you, dear readers, before it was gone from the market, but hopefully you’re seeing the trend with Flatlands Coffee and recognizing that you just can’t go wrong with them!