Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a new-to-me roaster from Des Moines, Iowa, Lightbrite Coffee Roasters. This morning I’m checking out their Guji Natural from Ethiopia, so let’s dive into this cup!
Lightbrite Coffee Roasters website
Purchase this coffee directly for $13/8oz
LIGHTBRITE COFFEE ROASTERS GUJI NATURAL
A couple weeks ago I zipped up to Des Moines, IA to visit family. This is a quick 3 hour drive from Kansas City, one of the most boring in the world, so it’s always a good opportunity to catch up on podcasts, too! LOL My mainstays in Des Moines are Mars Cafe and Horizon Line, but on a whim I shot Horizon Line a message on Instagram for some recommendations and one of those was Lightbrite Coffee Roasters. Thanks to HL for being cool and spreading whatever reach I have through KC Coffee Geek out to some of their competitors in town… very good on them! Lightbrite Coffee Roasters are located in Grimes, IA, but with the sprawl of Midwestern cities like Des Moines that have no natural borders, it’s hard to tell what’s a suburb and what’s a separate city these days. Their location is just a few minutes off I-35, so it’s easy to get to and won’t take you too far out of your way if you’re headed someplace else on that route. This was perfect for me because my family is all out on the west side of the city, so it was convenient for me. I was on a mission, so I just bought a couple bags and didn’t stick around. That said, the cafe looked nice, bright with the morning sun pouring in, and inviting for a sit-down sometime in the future.
To tell you a little about Lightbrite Coffee Roasters, it looks like they got their start in Summer 2019 and was started by Matt and Megan McNeece. Matt is a director of missions at Lutheran Church of Hope, so this strong church/coffee connection is similar to what I’m used to in the Kansas City coffee community, too. Matt participated in a commercial coffee roasting workshop with Mill City Roasters, who I believe are located up in Minneapolis, Minnesota and seem to have a very strong presence in the new-to-roasting commercial sector with their distribution of affordable, full-featured roasters that are produced in China.
I bought two bags of coffee from Lightbrite, and this Guji Natural from Ethiopia set me back $13 for 8oz. The bags look pretty much like full-size 12oz bags, but they are smaller, which I actually like, so don’t be surprised by that. As I’ve been doing recently, I’ll review the coffee FIRST and then tell you all about the details, the same way I actually do it in real life so I don’t bias my palate. What I can tell you right now is that this is an Ethiopian natural process coffee, so I am expecting berry notes, maybe some chocolate depending on the roast level, good body and sweetness and maybe some ferment notes, too. Let’s check it out!
Opening the bag and smelling, I’m not getting hit with the big berry notes I’m accustomed to, but no worries, the fragrance of the beans don’t always tell a lot of the story. After grinding the coffee, a little bit of berry peeps out, but, again, this is not the berry bomb I would expect from the prototypical Ethiopian natural. This looks visually to be a medium-light roast, but I’ll run some tests on the Espresso Vision Roast Vision device to get a number for us. On the Roast Vision instrument, I’m getting equal readings of 25-26. This device uses light to determine the color of the coffee on a scale from 0-35 with higher numbers being lighter roasts. 26 is the first “light roast” number on their scale and 25 is the last “medium-light” so this is a light roast, certainly. On the Agtron scale, this converts to something in the 93-96 scale. I’m brewing this coffee at a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin flat-bottom 3-hole dripper (like a Kalita Wave). I’m using a Kalita 155 filter in there and my grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the brew bed during the process.
The first aromas I am getting from this cup are big caramel notes, a hint of molasses, and some citrus, which is a real surprise because of this being a natural. Usually berry jam or something like raspberry, blackberry, blueberry or strawberry will be on the menu in the aroma and I am not getting any of that here. Taking a sip, I’m getting even more surprises because those berry notes associated so closely with Ethiopian naturals aren’t really here for me, either. It can sometimes be hard to take your brain out of gear and pop it into reverse when expectations and reality aren’t synching up, but I’ll do my best! So, I’m greeted by a medium- to light+ bodied coffee and there is nice sweetness on the front end that reminds me of lime syrup like you’d get on a sno-cone or popsicle or something like that. I really like this flavor in this coffee… it’s sweet and light and refreshing in this context. In the second half of the sip I get a pleasant lemon-lime acidity that almost feels effervescent on my palate. Add some tingles of soda water and this would be coffee’s answer to 7-Up soda. If I go a while between sips, the aftertaste that lingers is 7-Up or Sprite or some similar lemon-lime soda. If I take a bigger sip and swallow faster, without agitating the coffee around in my mouth at all, I pick up a SLIGHT hint of raspberry, but it’s hard to tell if it’s REALLY there or if I’m hijacking my brain and forcing it to taste berries somewhere here. I’m really enjoying this coffee for what it is even while reeling in the cognitive dissonance of trying to rectify what I’m tasting vs what I think I’m supposed to be tasting! I do believe this is the first time I have ever written this statement down, but if this was a blind taste test, I wouldn’t call this a natural coffee in a million years and if you told me this was a washed Ethiopian, I wouldn’t skip a beat. As I wrote that, I just got a more real, bigger hit of raspberry, but it’s still subtle compared to the berry-forward “hit by a [insert name of berry] hammer” flavor I’m used to with Ethiopian naturals. If flavors were colors, this coffee would be all sorts of shades of green. I’m getting all those nice lime flavors, as well as a green grape vibe from the sweetness in this cup. This coffee is light and bright yet feels mellow in its acidity at the same time. I’m enjoying the heck out of it and I’m still absolutely reeling that this is a natural and not a washed coffee, I’m blown away by that! Also, I got zero ferment from this coffee, so if you avoid naturals because you can’t stand fermentation notes, this is the least-fermenty natural I’ve ever tasted. I did enjoy a lot of this bag as espresso, too, so I’ll finish out my review with my tasting notes on those ‘spro’s… in the meantime, here’s what Lightbrite says about this coffee…
The Details About This Coffee
So, getting into the details about this coffee on Lightbrite’s website, this is a natural process coffee from Kayon Mountain Farms in the Guji region of Ethiopia. This is a certified organic farming operation and coffee grows at a staggering 1900-2200masl there. Lightbrite’s flavor notes for this coffee are, “Raspberry, Juicy, Green Grape, Tangy” so I feel really good about that, and they say, “Berry forward, vibrant, yum. This is one of those coffees that can change a mind on what coffee can be, sweet berry vibes for days!” So, that’s where we disagree, but of course, taste and flavor is quite subjective and cupping notes vs tasting notes vs roasts on different days can play into all these things, too. Whether you get the coffee I tasted or the one more similar to Lightbrite’s tasting notes, this coffee is a winner, so that’s what matters!
Oh, and what’s all this talk about “natural?” Natural process is another term for “dry process” coffee. It means the coffee cherries are picked, sorted, and then dried whole on raised beds in the sun. The coffee is circulated at regular intervals to prevent rotting, and over the period of 2-3 weeks the cherries break down and dry out like big raisins, then the seeds inside (what we call coffee “beans”) are separated from the fruits. Coffee seeds are like sponges and they absorb flavors from anything they touch against. In the case of natural processing, they tend to be imbued with compounds that give them big fruit flavors, lots of sweetness and body, and usually some amount of fermentation notes, which I like, but to the unlucky minority, can taste like rotten garbage (sort of like how cilantro tastes like soap to some people).
Does is ‘Spro?
Yes, it does! I was pretty experimental with this coffee as I just added a manual pressure profiling valve to my Quick Mill Carola Evo espresso machine. This is a needle valve that allows me to control the amount of water and, therefore, pressure and flow, reaching the coffee puck in the portafilter. Mine is quite sensitive and I’m just learning how to use it, but by all accounts these “pressure profiling” valves shine with light roasts. They also allow a much finer grind, which changes everything. Just to give you a sense of this, I have two espresso grinders currently set up, an Orphan Espresso Lido E that is in the “normal” range for most espressos and tends to produce something between a 1 to 1.5-2 range in 25-30 seconds (i.e. 18g in the portafilter and 30-35g or so in the cup in 25-30 seconds), and my Orphan Espresso Pharos, which is set fine enough to choke the machine on anything but a super light grind. I just ran a shot using the Pharos and with the pressure valve wide open, and using 19.0g of coffee, I ended up with only 16g in the cup after running the pump for 30 seconds, so not a good shot by any standards.
Using the Lido E, I went 19.0g in, 29.2g out in 30 seconds and this gave me a lot of lemon-lime acidity, leaning more toward lime, some distinct raspberry notes, and cherry pie filling. The shot was a little intense still, but had good body and crema.
My final shot, as my caffeine tolerance was about to be blown up, used the pressure profiler and the very fine grind on the Pharos. Again, I used 19.0g in, and I started the timer as soon as I saw pressure reaching the portafilter, so I timed this shot at 30 seconds, too. This time I ended up with 32.1g of coffee in the cup, which goes to show what an effect pre-infusing the puck has on flow compared to just hitting it with full pressure, which nearly choked the machine. I almost doubled my yield in the same amount of time by gradually ramping up the pressure with the special valve. Anyway, this was the best shot, for sure. I held the pre-infusion at 1-2 bars of pressure for a handful of seconds, then allowed it to ramp up to about 8 bars, held it there for 1-2 seconds, and then ramped it back down to end the shot at 30 seconds. The crema was really weak on this one, but it still had good body and mouthfeel. The intensity dropped quite a bit and this was a more balanced and pleasant espresso shot than the one with the Lido E, which had similar time and dosing. I got a lot of that 7-Up/Sprite note from it, and again, it was almost effervescent feeling in my mouth. As the cup cooled I got a lot of that sweet cherry pie filling, then my last couple sips were strongly of chocolate covered cherries. Like, seriously, eating chocolate covered cherries! YUM is right!