Good morning and welcome to today’s review! We’re back in Ethiopia by way of New Hampshire with a natural coffee from Hometown Coffee Roaster. Slurp!
Purchase this coffee directly for $15/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Burundi Rimiro
HOMETOWN COFFEE ROASTERS ETHIOPIA GELANA ABAYA
We’re back in New Hampshire this morning, folks! The temperature outside here in Kansas City is single-digit, so it literally feels like New Hampshire at this point! Hometown Coffee Roasters is my first NH-based roaster and They seem to have gotten their start around mid-2017 or so and they’ve gone through a branding and logo change since, but Hometown doesn’t really like to talk about themselves on their media sites, so let’s jump right into this morning’s coffee!
I’m tasting Hometown’s Gelana Abaya, which is a natural process coffee from Ethiopia. I have a warm spot in my heart for Gelana Abaya as one of my all-time favorite naturals, roasted by Case Study in Portland, OR, was grown there, although that was many years ago. This is a Grade 1 natural grown in Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia at an altitude of 1950-2250masl. Hometown gives us tasting notes of, “berry, lemon, creamy” and recommends this as pourover, French press or espresso.
I’m using my standard pourover setup of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. I am using a Knock Aergrind for my grinder and pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation during brewing. This is a dense coffee and tended to run a little long compared to a lot of other coffees, but including a 30 second bloom it came in around 4:30.
A quick word about “natural” coffees for those who may be new to this thing… coffee is a cherry that grows on small trees or large shrubs, about the size of a standard cherry you’d see in the grocery store. Inside coffee cherries there are (usually) two seeds. Coffee is processed to remove those seeds, clean them from the goopy mucilage in the fruit, dry them and prepare them to be shipped “green” to roasters. Most people refer to coffee seeds as “beans.” Natural coffees are picked and sorted by hand, then the coffee cherries are left whole and intact and laid out on raised mesh beds to slowly dry and break down in the sun like big raisins. The coffee seeds, at this point in the process, are like sponges, so as the cherry fruit breaks down, sugars are converted into other compounds that are associated with other food flavors and the seeds soak these up. Natural processing tends to create a heavily fruited cup with good body and sweetness. On the downside, natural coffees do tend to absorb ferment flavors, which I love, but to some people they taste a little garbage-like.
When I opened the bag I was getting a lot of fruity chocolate notes from the whole beans. In the cup, the aroma from this coffee is prototypical Ethiopian natural with berries and hints of cocoa. I’m taking my first sip at 112 degrees F, which, give or take a few degrees, is where I recommend people start trying to taste the nuances in a cup of coffee. This coffee straddles the border between light body and medium… maybe a heavy light! If the aroma from this coffee was typical of a natural Ethiopian, the flavors really are! There is a honey sweetness to the cup and right up front I am getting berries and citrus. The berry notes are leaning toward raspberry for me, maybe a bit of blackberry, too. Accompanying those berries I’m getting some nice lemon candy acidity and a citrus note that leans closer to orange or tangerine, too. That’s a little more subtle than the lemon I’m getting, but there’s a sweet, almost orange juice-like component here in the background that I really like, and this OJ-ish flavor and mouthfeel (think of that thick saliva in the back of your throat you may get while drinking orange juice) persists long into the aftertaste, too. As the cup cools further I’m getting hit with grape Jolly Rancher notes and the mouthfeel seems to be getting denser and more consolidated, so I’d call this a solidly medium coffee now at 107 degrees (I’m getting a lot of use out of my new thermometer! LOL) There is a creamy, dairy-like mouthfeel to the cup even though it’s relatively light bodied, and I may even be getting some “lactic” notes that add a bit of milky, creamy flavors to the mix. This Gelana Abaya finishes sweet and leaves cream, raspberries, orangey lemon and some milk chocolate notes on the lingering aftertaste for me.
I love this coffee! It has a nice complexity for a natural Ethiopian but is still very accessible and easy drinking. There’s a decent amount of ferment to the cup, which I enjoy, and the flavors of cream (which as my cup reaches room temp, just gets more and more prevalent), berries, lemon and orange and chocolate are cleanly separated and easy to discern. This is what I would call a “structured” cup and I don’t tend to find that as often with natural coffees as I do with washed ones. Hometown Coffee Roasters have a winner on their hands with this Gelana Abaya! YUM!