S&W Craft Roasting Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Organic Worka Single Farm Natural Gelgelu Edema

Good morning and welcome to today’s review of the longest-named coffee in KC Coffee Geek review history from my good friends at S&W Craft Roasting! I’ve been away from coffee for a while due to family health issues, so it’s good to be back in front of the keyboard this morning with a coffee from one of my favorite roasters!

S&W Craft Roasting website

Purchase this coffee directly for $15.25/lb (yes, that’s 16 ounces!)

S&W CRAFT ROASTING ETHIOPIA YIRGACHEFFE ORGANIC WORKA SINGLE FARM NATURAL GELGELU EDEMA

TLDR: This review runs a little long, so here’s the quick version for you high-efficiency folks. This coffee ROCKS and is a STEAL at $15.25/lb. Watermelon, rose, lemon candy, sweet, balanced, slightly juicy, probably excellent as cold brew although I didn’t test that out myself, a delicious, easy drinker from an awesome roaster. Buy it. Now, on to the full story…

Now THAT’S a name! S&W Craft Roasting are back with the longest-named coffee in KC Coffee Geek review history, and I think they may have held the previous record to begin with! LOL Weirdly, I haven’t featured any coffee from S&W since 2019, but I’ve been in touch with them here and there since and I know their business is booming and they were making moves to expand their roasting operation, equipment and personnel. S&W have been sending me coffee to review since I started in 2015, so it’s awesome to see them simultaneously grow and still retain the things I love about them in the process! S&W Craft Roasting was founded by friends, Nick and Charlie, in the tiny (population about 550!) town of Coatesville, Indiana. More than any roaster I’ve ever featured on KC Coffee Geek, S&W embody value, giving you top-notch coffees, expertly roasted, at insanely good prices. Most of their coffees still come in at around $15/lb, which is a steal. S&W is one of my go-to roasters and they can do no wrong, in my book, so when someone is looking for a new roaster to try, I always include them on my list of recommendations. I have pretty much their full lineup of current coffees in right now, so look for more reviews in this series in the coming days.

Being located in rural Indiana is certainly part of S&W’s cost savings, but they are also strictly roasters, with no high-overhead cafe to support. Charlie and Nick pay a lot of attention to processes and efficiency, doing a lot with the equipment they have and expanding slowly as profits allow. Their no-frills website and branding are part of the equation, too. Currently, they’re shipping in gold bags, an “upgrade” from the previous black ones, and their branding is a simple sticker with their pretty old school logo and another sticker with the coffee info. No printing, no fancy graphics, a website that is super old-school… but here’s the deal, it all works and it all contributes to their ability to sell you REALLY GOOD coffees for $15-ish per POUND. So, that’s a tradeoff I can certainly live with and so can everyone else who discovers this gem in Indiana farm country! I know, we “taste with our eyes” and blah blah blah, and I’m a BIG fan of design and pretty bags and cool websites and all that, but I’d rather have $15 of my dollars go into $1 of bag and labels than spend $22 for 12 ounces of the same coffee in a fancy bag that will get recycled when I’m done with it.

As always, I want to write my review like I experience it in real life, giving you my tasting notes before we learn more about what S&W wants us to get out of this coffee. The mind is EASILY swayed when it comes to flavor perception, so I stay away from websites and even try to avoid seeing the labels as much as possible until after my notes are done. This coffee is a single-estate coffee, somewhat of a rarity in Ethiopia, where most coffee comes from combined lots from the tiny farm plots grown by the members of a cooperative. I’ll talk a lot more about the coffee at the end of my tasting notes… This coffee is very light roast and the beans were dense and hard, but no problem in my Orphan Espresso Lido 3 grinder that I use for pourovers. It definitely gave me a full-body workout in the Pharos grinder, which is MUCH more sensitive to bean densities due to the massive burrs and the “gearing” ratio. I used my standard pourover setup of a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of beans to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. This dripped is flat-bottomed and I have it set up to have 3 holes in the bottom, just like a Kalita Wave. I am using Kalita 155 filters and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation. This coffee’s density made it run a little slow, with the total brew time including a 30 second bloom running 4:30. It’s a light roast, so the increased time is probably a good thing to help with the extraction.

My Tasting Notes
This coffee has a nice aroma that I am really enjoying this morning… there are some florals here, hints of berries, maybe even some watermelon. Taking a sip, this is a medium to medium-light bodied coffee, at least at the warmer end of my drinking range. In my experience, it’s not uncommon for some of these light-roasted Ethiopian coffees to feel like the mouthfeel gets denser as they cool down, so we’ll see. Taking a sip, this is an unsurprisingly bright and fruity coffee with watermelon candy/soda being the first flavor that is triggered in my brain. There’s a honey-like sweetness anchoring the cup on the sweet end and offering some balance to the bright fruit notes. On top of that watermelon I mentioned I’m getting some hints of lemon candy and some berry jam. I’m not picking up specific berries, yet, from this coffee, but rather more of a mixed berry vibe, sweet and bright. At what I would consider sort of the midrange of my drinking temperature range I’m getting very little ferment, so this would be an easily tolerated natural for people sensitive to ferment notes (some people are unlucky and associate ferment in natural coffees with garbage/trash, sort of like how cilantro tastes like soap to some people).

As the cup is cooling it’s getting denser, as I thought it would, and it’s now a solid medium to a medium-heavy bodied coffee. The florals are coming through more now, too, and I’m getting something that reminds me of roses here. Along with this rose note I’m getting a little savoriness out of the cup that I didn’t get at a warmer temp. The watermelony flavor still dominates for me, with that berry jam coming out more in the finish and definitely in the lingering aftertaste. The lemon candy acidity seems to have toned down a bit, too. This is a refreshing coffee with “cool” flavors that I find myself sort of gulping too fast to get more and more of. I am not the biggest cold brew fan in the world and I don’t even know where my cold brew accessories are to be able to make some, but if these flavors translate to cold brew or a Japanese flash cold brew method, then this coffee would be really good on ice. The melon, rose and lemon seem very refreshing to me, and this coffee has nice, balanced sweetness that I think would work well as a cold drink. There’s a BIT of juiciness to this cup, too, which always has me taking bigger and bigger sips. This coffee finishes neutral and leaves a SLIGHTLY dry feeling on my tongue about 5 seconds after the last swallow, but it doesn’t have that black tea feel and flavor that accompanies many coffees from this region. I’m really enjoying this coffee, the flavors are delicious and well-defined, giving the cup clarity and structure that is more akin to a washed Ethiopian coffee rather than a natural. This is a really nice, easy drinker with plenty of complexity and I think works well in a range of temperatures. At this price, a high quality natural coffee is an absolute steal at $15.25 for a pound, another reason S&W Craft Roasting are one of my faves and their business has been EXPLODING over the past couple years!

As I mentioned above, I did run this coffee a few times as espresso, too. I pulled out more strawberry-specific notes and it was a bright, fruit-forward espresso that I think worked as a single origin espresso, but MAY not play well with milk. I don’t really have dairy and my Quick Mill Carola Evo doesn’t steam milk, it’s espresso-only, but sometimes these very bright and fruit-forward ‘spros aren’t the best with milk, but I didn’t test it that way. I was pulling 40-41g shots from a 20g dose and ramping them up and down after a long-ish pre-infusion using a manual pressure valve on my machine.

About the Coffee
What does all this stuff in the name tell us? A lot, actually! This morning’s coffee is an organic coffee grown in Ethiopia at the Gelgelu Edema farm/estate. As I stated, this is a single-farm coffee, which is somewhat unusual for Ethiopia. A lot of the specialty coffee in Ethiopia is grown on very tiny plots where the farmers wouldn’t really even have enough coffee for their own lot. These smallholder farmers work in cooperatives, who generally own one or more “factories,” which is where the farmers bring their harvest, beans are sorted, combined into lots, and further processed. This coffee was isolated as a single-farm lot and processed by the Worka cooperative. The farm is located in the area of Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia, and grows at a staggering 2040-2300 meters above sea level. This is a natural process coffee, meaning the coffee cherries are sorted and then dried slowly in the sun like big raisins. The fruit breaks down and begins to ferment, creating a whole host of compounds that give a range of mostly fruit flavors to the beans inside, which soak them up like little sponges. Typically, Ethiopian naturals have a lot of berry notes.

I’m happy to read S&W’s description of this coffee, saying, “This is a dense, clean cup for a natural process. Tea rose and hibiscus lead the flavors, with good body and light sweetness. City roast. Fruit tones seem to flitter in and out of this crop from one bag to the next, so don’t be surprised if you find a few.” I’m usually not great at identifying specific floral notes, so I’m happy to see validation in the rose flavor I was picking up! “City” level of roast is just about as light as you’ll see from most roasters. City roasts are still in the process of first crack (a literal cracking sound that the beans make, like popcorn, as they roast) when they are stopped and cooled, but this roast is past the “cinnamon roast” stage where coffee can still be quite grassy tasting. City roasts have virtually no roasty character and emphasize the coffee’s origin characteristics, so it’s often used at the cupping table when coffees are being compared and contrasted.