Good morning and welcome to today’s review. We’re practicing social distancing here in Kansas City starting this week, so it’s a great time to catch up on reviews and spend some of your money on the roasters that will undoubtedly be hit hard by the Covid-19 response. Coffee has some antioxidants in it, so there’s that! Let’s check out the last of my coffees from SteamDot, their Guji from Ethiopia…
Purchase this coffee for $18/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Rebuild Women’s Hope (Congo) | Finca Los Lesquines Lot #44 (Honduras) | Gakurari Peaberry (Kenya)
STEAMDOT GUJI ETHIOPIA
SteamDot was founded in 2009 in Anchorage, Alaska and they’re the first roaster I’ve been able to feature from Alaska. Their first location was in a big red shed in Anchorage’s historic rail yards, across the street from where the locomotives park. In their own works, “We could feel the ground shake when they rumbled to life. We fell in love with the play on words between billowing steam from trains and espresso machines, and the dot on the map where our beginnings took root.” What I love about this is this same “red dot” is now on our KC Coffee Geek map. SteamDot say they were the first “third wave” espresso and coffee shop in Alaska and they distribute their beans to other cofee shops all over Alaska now. Like most third wave shops, they feature espresso and drip coffee in the form of pourovers, as well as siphon. Their goal is to source, roast and present the best beans possible, roasting to maximize the terroir of the coffees in their lineup. They also do barista training on-site and are active SCA members and do barista events like throwdowns. Today, they’ve grown to three cafés in Anchorage plus their roastery.
This morning’s coffee from SteamDot is their Guji from Ethiopia. This is a washed coffee consisting of Typica variety beans grown around 1900-2100masl. The Guji Zone is part of the Oromia Region and it’s a big growing region for coffee. This coffee comes from the Guracho Washing Station, which collects coffee from about 2300 smallholder farmers in the region. SteamDot gives us tasting notes of “candied ginger, bergamot, peach” for this coffee and as a washed coffee it’s a totally different experience to expect from the berry-forward naturals of Ethiopia. SteamDot says this coffee is a fan favorite and Guji coffees are a flagship in their cafes.
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 grind with a Knock Aergrind and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the brew bed. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and brewed in 3:00 total including the bloom.
The aroma from this coffee is sweet and has some light floral notes, somewhat expected from a washed Ethiopian coffee. Taking a sip, this is medium to medium-heavy bodied coffee and has a lot more density than I was expecting. Washed Ethiopian coffees can sometimes be somewhat thin and tea-like, but not this one. Those floral notes come through nicely on the front end of the sip, heavy in one of the few floral notes I can readily identify, which is jasmine! There is a light honey sweetness anchoring this cup and keeping it from floating away. Usually my palate attenuates to floral notes pretty quickly, but not today. The jasmine note is really big and dominates this cup, but after that wall of jasmine there is a nice peach flavor and sweetness with just a hint of tartness that comes with eating the skin of a peach, too. This isn’t a super peachy coffee to me, but it’s definitely here. Bergamot is a great call for this coffee, too, and I can’t agree more with SteamDot’s tasting notes. Bergamot is a citrus fruit about the size of an orange that has a peel the color of a lime. Bergamot is a common fragrance but if you’ve ever had Earl Grey tea, there’s bergamot in there giving it its characteristic flavor. Now that my brain has anchored to Earl Grey and bergamot, I am getting a good amount of black tea notes in this cup, especially in the finish and aftertaste, which reminds me of an iced Earl Grey tea with no sugar added. I’m getting hints of graham cracker or pie crust or something to that effect in the finish, too. This coffee has a slightly dry, almost astringent finish which I find to be very common in washed Ethiopian coffees and I think that adds a lot to the tea-like character of this coffee as it has a finish similar to tea, too. It’s funny that I started this review off saying this coffee wasn’t real tea-like and then spent the last half of it comparing it to tea, but that’s what temperature does in a hot drink!
I LOVE this coffee! It’s everything I like in a washed Ethiopian coffee but with more body and presence than usual. I imagine this is a crowd pleaser in SteamDot’s cafes, it makes total sense why. Sweet, flavorful, structured, easy to drink… I’m not much of a cold brew fan, but I’ll bet this is great as a cold brew or Japanese style iced coffee, too. YUM!