Daysol Coffee Lab Organic Limu

Good morning and welcome to today’s review! We’ve made it to 2020 and I want to start the year off with a new roaster! Let’s check out Daysol Coffee Lab, and their Tega & Tula Ethiopian coffee!

Daysol Coffee Lab

Purchase this coffee for $15/12oz

DAYSOL COFFEE LAB ORGANIC LIMU

Daysol Coffee Lab is a relatively new venture, but half of this partership is a roaster we’ve seen on KC Coffee Geek before, Bert Davis. When we last saw Bert it was around February 2018 and he was roasting under the name, Ki Roasters, out of Littleton, CO, and doing a darn fine job of it. In May 2019, Bert and his family made a big move to Birmingham, Alabama, and since then he teamed up with co-owner, Peter Solis. Daysol is a play on words and names, but it represents Bert and Peter’s partnership in roasting coffee and sharing it with their community, and if you want to read the full story, you should check out their website.

This morning’s coffee from Daysol is their Organic Limu, a washed Ethiopian selection from Tega and Tula Specialty Coffee Farm. Tega and Tula is named for two neighboring villages in the Limu region of Ethiopia and coffee grows around 1800-2100masl there. This is a mix of wild Keffa Forest varieties as well as 6 numbered varieties from the region. I reviewed a Tega & Tula selection from Bespoken Coffee Roasters in September, so this may be the same lot, or something quite similar at least. The link for this particular coffee lists the growing altitude as 1693-1860masl and tells us this coffee has flavors of, “Mango, green grape, lime, grapefruit, caramel, sugar cane juice and cocoa flavors; sweet and balanced.” The bag label calls out, “Citrus, caramel, cocoa” specifically.

To brew this coffee I’m using my trusty 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin flat bottom brewer with a Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and the total brew time was about 3:13.

I’ve talked about the importance of temperature in the brewing and, especially, drinking and appreciation process with coffee, so I picked up a quick-read thermometer, after so many years of guessing, so I can start to tell you some numbers. My first sip of this coffee was at 113F (45C) and it feels on the warm side of the spectrum where I find the most flavors in the cup. A few more minutes of typing and things were down to 110F (43C) and those few degrees made a big difference! Taking this sip, I am getting a light bodied coffee with a lot of bright and sweet citrus on the front end, some florals, and a lot of flavors hitting me all at once, so let’s try to break this down some more.

The front end of the sip is sweet and fruity and I’m getting both citrus and tropical notes here. The tropical side of things has a hint of pineapple, with some of that tartness I get from pineapple, as well as something along the lines of mango or papaya. The citrus notes are a little more complex and a bit more difficult to separate out. I’m getting orange juice here, definitely some grapefruit, lime. The OJ comes in on the front and is sweet, then the citrus notes morph into grapefruit, without the pith, and lime because I’m getting a little bitterness in this part of the sip (I mean, coffee is inherently a bitter drink, so bitterness is always there) that I always associate with lime. The grapefruit and tropical notes persist into the second half of the sip and ride out into the finish and aftertaste. In the second half of the sip I’m getting some sweet milk chocolate notes underneath all that fruitiness, and there is a lightly caramel sweetness underneath all of that, too. For all the sweetness in this cup, the finish on this coffee is quite dry, but leaves a nice, long aftertaste of chocolate and tropical fruits.

Looking back at my Tega & Tula review from Bespoken, I was finding orange juice, lemon, tangerine, and something that tasted like, “mango and pineapple had a child” LOL, so if this isn’t the same lot, it’s a very similar one. This is a knockout coffee! It has a lot of complexity and once it is past that 110F/43C temperature, opens up very nicely and continues to be an excellent drinker down to room temperature. I’m really enjoying the grapefruit here, which has an almost peppery undertone to it, but the tropicals and other citrus notes just work together like a symphony in this coffee! Bert has only been roasting coffee since 2015 and it seems like life has taken him in some unexpected directions recently, but with coffees like this dropping from his roaster, I’m so glad he is still roasting as Daysol Coffee Lab now. The world needs this coffee!