Good morning and welcome to 2021! It’s a new year and that means new coffees! This morning I’m checking out Oddly Correct’s Ethiopia Demeka Honey, a coffee sourced by friends and roasted by one of my favorite roasters, so let’s dive into this one.
Purchase this coffee directly for $19/12oz
ODDLY CORRECT DEMEKA HONEY
I’m cheating a little with this review because I bought this coffee from Oddly Correct about a month ago, but I’m still calling it my first review of 2021! Shhhh… don’t tell! I’ve been enjoying this coffee as espresso, primarily, but I did sneak in a couple filter brews, too. Oddly Correct is a local business here in Kansas City that started out strictly as a roastery probably around 2013 or 2014 or so, then opened a tasting room/cafe around 2014 or 2015 if memory serves me. They gained local infamy by being “the coffee shop that doesn’t have cream or sugar,” but their skill with roasting coffee was quickly recognized by us coffee geeks in the community and what they’re REALLY well known for is roasting and serving awesome coffee. In the last couple years they’ve softened their additives stance a little by offering a couple of house-made flavored lattes, which are VERY good indulgences, although for me, Oddly Correct is my go-to shop for a straight shot of espresso. Oddly is one of my favorite roasters, and I think they do particularly well with African coffees, although I’ve not had anything I didn’t like from them in all these years.
This morning’s coffee is their Ethiopia Demeka Honey, and it was sourced and imported by some other friends of mine, Emily and Michael McIntyre from Catalyst Coffee Consulting. Shortly after I started KC Coffee Geek, Emily was working for Case Study Coffee Roasters in Portland, OR and we got an opportunity to meet and she really went out of her way to support what I was doing, so it’s great to see her and Michael on their own in Catalyst. They specialize in Ethiopian coffee and they do a great job of selecting beautiful coffees.
This particular coffee is a honey process selection from Sidama, grown at 2100-2200masl. Most Ethiopian coffee comes from cooperatives where hundreds of smallholder farmers bring their coffee and it’s combined and sorted into lots, so this is from a collective of farms rather than a single estate. I’m sure the “honey” in the name is throwing some of you a little, too, but there’s no actually honey in the mix here, that’s just the nomenclature used for this process of taking the coffee from cherry to something that can be roasted. Coffee is a fruit, with two seeds (usually) inside the cherry. These seeds are what we call coffee beans. There are a lot of ways to get these beans out of the cherry, which is also full of a goopy, sweet mucilage (aka “honey”) that clings to the seeds, so they can be dried and transported to roasters. Generally speaking, there are dry process (aka natural) methods, in which the coffee is sorted and then laid out on mesh beds to dry in the sun like big raisins before the cherries are eventually removed. The other main type of process is wet process (aka washed), where the cherries are run through a machine that ruptures them, then the seeds are washed of the mucilage in fermentation and rinsing tanks, then the naked coffee beans are laid out to dry. One of the variations that sits in the middle of these two processes is called “honey” processing. Honeys are common in Central America and are gaining a footing all over now, but I think this is the first one I’ve had from Ethiopia. Oddly Correct says this coffee is “juicy, sweet, fruity” and promises flavors of “tart cherry, lime zest, fudge.” I paid $19 for this 12oz bag, money well spent, and the $18-$22 range per bag is what the market in the USA seems to be for high quality Ethiopian coffees like this.
Honey process coffees are run through the depulper to rupture the skins and remove the seeds, but instead of the sticky mucilage being washed off, these beans are laid out on raised mesh beds like natural coffees, so they dry out with a layer of this sticky syrupy stuff on them which is removed later in the process. This is supposed to give coffee more body and sweetness, like natural coffees tend to have, but none or very, very little of the fermentation notes that naturals pick up normally. To some people, these fermentation notes taste like literal rotting garbage, and to others (like me) these fermentation notes taste great and we love them. So, honey processing is sort of a “best of both worlds” where you get a sweeter, bigger bodied coffee that is also clean like a washed coffee.
Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium+ bodied coffee for me with a nice presence on my palate. It really spreads out fast and seems to hit all the areas of my mouth as I drink it, so there is a lot of physical sensation going on with this coffee that I don’t always get, in addition to all that’s happening with the flavors. There is a light caramel sweetness to this coffee that offers some balance to all the fruit notes coming through, and they’re really the star of this show. There’s a lot of citrus here, as well as tropical notes to parse out. I’m getting lime acidity and a hint of floral that I would call “lime flowers” although I’m not sure if there is such a thing or what they smell like! LOL There’s some lemon candy in the mix, too, and I get a lot of these citrus notes if I take a small sip and swallow pretty quickly. If I hold the coffee in my mouth for a few seconds more body and sweetness come through and I get sweet cherry and a lot less acidity from the citrus. I’m also getting some single origin dark chocolate notes here, which I usually find to be quite fruity in and of themselves. The cooling cup mellows in the citrus lemon-lime notes some and gets really sweet and heavy bodied, with more cherry and dark chocolate coming through. I wouldn’t expect that from such a brightly citrused coffee as this is in warmer temps. I’m getting a little bit of a savory component as this coffee is cooling, too, a hint of umami and something that reminds me of the tomato note a lot of Kenyan coffees have, but it’s not quite that same thing. I think whenever sweetness, acidity and heavy body hit my palate it conjures tomatoes, ketchup, that sort of thing, so my brain must be wired to put those flavors together even if I’m not outright tasting something tomatoey. I did mention tropical notes and I’m getting something that reminds me a little of pineapple, although, again, I’m not sure it actually tastes like pineapple, it just reminds me of that… there’s some tartness and sweetness at the same time. This coffee finishes sweet and has a nice aftertaste of umami and lime for me. As espresso, this coffee did best when I was using 20g doses and getting around 32-35g of coffee in the cup at around 30-32 seconds. I was getting nice body, a good looking crema, and lots of lime and cherry notes, as well as some hits of pink grapefruit and graham cracker. Another fantastic coffee from Oddly Correct and it’s clean like a washed Ethiopian coffee but has a bigger presence and a heavier mouthfeel than some of my favorite washed coffees from there, which can often feel more like drinking tea than coffee. What a great start to 2021!