Maps Coffee Abyssinian Flower

Good morning and welcome to today’s review of an Ethiopian coffee from Maps Coffee here in Kansas City. It has been 7 years (7!) since I last wrote about Maps on KC Coffee Geek and I just cannot believe that!

Maps Coffee website

Purchase this coffee for $16/12oz

MAPS COFFEE ABYSSINIAN FLOWER

I’m embarassed to say it, but the last time I wrote about local coffee (and so much more) roaster, Maps Coffee, was in 2014. I didn’t even know what KC Coffee Geek was going to become at that time, I was just blogging about the coffee-related things I was up to. I visited Maps and got to hang out for a while with founder, Vincent Rodriguez, who I considered to be a true modern renaissance man. Back in 2014, Maps Coffee was located in Veloplus bike shop, which Vince had also started after leaving a 20 year career with Starbucks. So, there was the bike shop, a brand new, shiny Loring roaster over in the corner, a bike framebuilding shop tucked into the back, and they were clearing out some floorspace for the weekly yoga session! LOL I couldn’t understand what was happening and I liked it!

A lot has happened at Maps since 2014, as you can imagine. Sometime in the past handful of years, Vince started to get into chocolate, like really into chocolate, and chocolate is a big part of the Maps business today. I need to check that out. I’m not sure if Vince and team roast the cacao beans, but they do process cacao using stone grinders for 20+ hours and really make chocolate, not just buying it and melting it into shape. In 2018, Vince sold Veloplus and the bike shop is located a stone’s throw away. That gave Vince a lot of space to play and while roasting and chocolate-making are the primary operations at Maps, Vince is still making bike frames in there and does an annual custom frame giveaway, a 15% discount if you ride your bike to Maps, and continues to roast the original bike shop-themed blends he started out with at Maps Coffee. He has even had time to get into mixing chocolate with microground coffee, a product he calls Bloc (but with a weird “B” I can’t figure out how to make on my computer LOL).

All good stuff. Back in 2014 Vince’s ethos when it came to roasting coffee was definitely aimed at the general consumer rather than the full on coffee geek and he was roasting in the medium to dark range at a time where everyone was in a race to see how light you could roast coffee without breaking your grinder or ending up with something gross in the cup. Maps was more into approachable coffees roasted in a more familiar way… coffee for the people, I suppose! Maps’ marketing guy reached out to me recently about doing a review and sent me a bag of their Abyssinian Flower, so let’s check that out. As always, I’ll save some of the detail for the end of the review so as to not bias my palate by reading all the flavor descriptions and stuff as I’m drinking and writing. All I know at this point about this coffee is that it is from Ethiopia.

My Tasting Notes
I used my standard pourover method for this coffee, which is a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. I have my Origin set up for three drain holes in the bottom, and it’s flat, so basically a Kalita Wave. It uses Kalita 155 filters and I pulse pour through a Melodrip to minimize agitation in the brew bed. My grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. This coffee took exactly 3:30 to brew and I did a 30 second bloom at the start on top of that, so a 4:00 total brew time. This is a dark enough roast you could certainly try shorter times and probably have no issues.

The aroma from the brewer is molasses and darkly caramelized sugars. As the cup cools and settles in a little I’m getting pretty much the same with a hint of something lighter that I can’t quite identify… part of my brain says there is a little bit of a floral note there, part says it’s a little hint of lime. I’m stumped. I took some sips to dip my toe in and this is a coffee well worth waiting to cool down quite a bit before drinking. This is true of every coffee, but this Abyssinian Flower really opens up a lot as it comes under 110F. At this lukewarm temperature this is a medium+ to heavy- bodied coffee with a nice presence on my palate. At warmer temps it was mostly a “coffee” coffee, leaning more into the darker roast territory of not having so much origin charactuer, but here I’m getting a lot more out of it. There is a lot of sweetness in the cup with caramel and some brown sugar coming through for me, but there’s a surprising amount of fruit coming through, too, that wasn’t so apparent at higher temperatures. Always let your coffee cool down, people! Unless it’s gross to begin with, in which case, the hotter the better! LOL

The typical fruit profile of an Ethiopian coffee lends toward berry notes… blueberry, raspberry, strawberry, blackberry, berry jam, etc, but that’s really for those classic natural process Ethiopian coffees. Here I’m getting really no berry to speak of, but I am picking up that lime I thought I smelled in the aroma and it’s really all over this coffee, not just a spike of acidity to balance the sweetness. It does that, too, but this is a really lime-forward coffee for me in a way that I have never really experienced and I’m really enjoying it. It’s a deeper, more mellow flavor note that spreads out throughout the sip instead of being a brief high note that accents the coffee. I really like this. I’m guessing this is a washed process coffee because of this, but we’ll see in a minute. Washed Ethiopian coffees, for me, tend to have a lot of lemon and lime notes in them, but when they are roasted a little darker like this one they usually lose those notes mostly, so I find this really interesting that there is so much lime here but also in a solidly medium roast. In my sips I’m getting some flashes of coriander, too, which if you’ve ever had a Blue Moon beer you have tasted A LOT of coriander. It’s a nice complement to the lime, for sure. This coffee finishes sweet and has a lingering aftertaste of caramelized sugar and lime on my palate. If I wait a few minutes between sips it turns mostly into roastiness and a slightly burned character, but there isn’t a lot of roastiness in the actual sip for me.

This is a nice coffee and I’m really enjoying it. I pulled some espresso shots with this coffee, too, and it plays well with my setup and is an interesting cup, pretty much just a concentrated version of what I wrote about above. I actually like this Abyssinian Flower more as a pourover than as espresso, although it’s not bad at all as ‘spro. This is definitely a crowd-pleaser of a coffee and probably a good gateway for people just dipping their toes into specialty coffee. It’s familiar and accessible, but if you have some patience to let it cool down, open up and develop, the drinker is rewarded with enough origin character that they’ll say, “Hey, what’s this?” and not just say, “Yep, that’s coffee and it tastes like coffee.” Nicely done, Maps Coffee!

More About the Coffee 
Well, I was wrong and I’m actually really floored by this… Abyssinian Flower is actually a natural processed Ethiopian coffee, not the washed coffee I guessed! This may be the first time I’ve ever been stumped by the processing on an Ethiopian coffee as my palate usually picks up on berries really well. With this in mind and drinking my last few sips of this cup while channeling “berries… berries… berries…” through my brain, I’m still not picking up on any berry related flavors at all. LOL Wow! Maps says, “Creamy body, smooth, floral, berry jam notes.” The berry part of my brain is definitely busted today! Not to brag or anything, but I have a pretty good palate and the berry notes in natural Ethiopians are usually not in the least bit subtle, so this is a real paradigm-shifter for me and I love it! And, yes, it does say “Berry aroma” right on the front of the bag, but I did a good job of avoiding looking at anything that could bias myself, proof of that with this epic fail of a guess! LOL

This coffee is from the Uraga washing station in the Guji Zone of Ethiopia near the town of Haro Wachu. About 900 farmers participate in this co-op to produce coffees that are processed here. In Ethiopia, the bulk of coffee production is done by smallholder farmers with very small plots of land, so they work in cooperatives centered around washing stations. Farmers harvest their coffee cherries and drop them off at the washing station, where they are sorted into lots and then further processed to remove the seeds (what we call coffee beans) from the cherry fruits. A natural coffee like Abyssinian Flower is laid out on raised mesh beds with the coffee cherry intact and the fruits dry out, break down, and ferment, imparting body, sweetness and in Ethiopian coffees’ case, usually a berry-related flavor note to the seeds, which soak all this up like little sponges. Eventually the dried out cherries are milled and the seeds are removed to be shipped around the world.