Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a new organic Ethiopian coffee from my friends at Theodore’s Coffee Roasters! I’m excited to try this out and get back to some writing after about a week off, so I’m glad you’ve joined me!
Theodore’s Coffee Roasters website
Purchase this coffee for $22/12oz with free shipping
THEODORE’S COFFEE ROASTERS BANTI NENGA
Theodore’s Coffee Roasters are one of my go-to roasters. I can very confidently tell any coffee drinker to get pretty much anything from Theodore’s and they will like it. I’ve tasted a ton of their coffees over the years I’ve been doing KC Coffee Geek and I have yet to have something I didn’t enjoy from them. Theodore’s was founded by Darwin Pavon in 2013. Darwin is Honduran and has an extensive background in coffee working as an agronomist with hundreds of farms from Mexico to Colombia. He knows coffee, let’s just say that! Theodore’s was previously located near Flint, Michigan, but recently moved to Zeeland on the west coast of the state. I lived in the town right next door, Holland, for seven years. How would my life have changed if Theodore’s was there back in 2000??? Darwin keeps a stable of consistent blends available and always has a staggering number of single origin coffees on hand. Most of what he roasts is Central American and African, but like I said, I have yet to have a mediocre coffee from Theodore’s. They’ve recently started making chocolate and often have raw panela sugar available on the website, too, so you can pick up sweets for all your vices in one place!
Today’s coffee from Theodore’s is is their Banti Nenga. This is a natural process coffee grown around 2100masl in the Guji zone of Ethiopia, where loads of fantastic coffees are grown. The local people are called Banti Nenga, hance the name. This is a certified organic coffee and I’ll share more about the flavor notes when I get to the end of the review after sharing my tasting notes with you.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “natural coffee,” it refers to the processing that takes the coffee from a cherry with two seeds (what we call coffee beans) in it to what is shipped all over the world to roasters as “green” coffee. “Natural” processing uses very little, if any water. The cherries are picked and sorted, then spread out on raised mesh beds, usually a couple inches deep, to slowly dry out and break down in the sun like big raisins. This usually takes a few weeks and the coffee station workers will circulate and mix the cherries frequently to keep them drying but not getting moldy or etc. The coffee seeds are like little sponges, soaking up all sorts of chemicals in the breaking down fruit. Hundreds, if not thousands, of these chemicals are the same or similar as what is found in other foods, so you get things that remind you of flowers, various fruits, types of sugars, etc, even though none of those things is actually in the coffee. Very cool! Ethiopian naturals tend to be famous for berry notes, especially blueberry and strawberry, and natural processing usually imparts a lot of fruitiness, body and sweetness to the coffee within.
My brewing method for this cup is a pourover, using a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. This is a flat-bottom 3-hole dripper like a Kalita Wave or anything similar and it uses Kalita 155 size filters. I grind with an Orphan Espresso Lido 3 and pulse pour my water through a Melodrip for consistency across cups and to minimize agitation of the brew bed as much as possible. This coffee had a total brew time of 3:53 including a 40-ish second bloom.
My Tasting Notes
As I’ve been doing for a while, I’ll share my tasting notes and then tell you more about the coffee. This is reflective of how I actually review coffees, as the mind is INCREDIBLY open to suggestion when it comes to flavors. So, I avoid even looking at the labels as much as I can, compile my notes, then do my research into the coffee so my notes are my own and not influenced by the information the roaster gives. The aroma from the brewed cup is giving me some berries (leaning toward raspberry) and also something a little floral, a hint of lime, and a hint of brown sugar. Very inviting, for sure! Taking my first sip, this is a medium+ to heavy- bodied coffee for me and it’s still pretty warm for my drinking preference, so I imagine this is going to cool down to a heavy-bodied coffee, but we’ll see. My first sip had some of that berry I got in the aroma but a lot of caramelized sugars and sugary sweetness, too. A very nice initial sip, but let’s cool it off a little and open up some more… Even just a few degrees cooler, this coffee is opening up a lot. That lime acidity I got hints of in the aroma is coming through, and I’m getting some florals in the sip now, too. Now that I’m in my comfortable range for tasting (usually under 110F for most coffees is my starting point), I can say this coffee is not the prototypical Ethiopian natural, i.e. a berry bomb. I’m getting some nice raspberry notes in the flavors and actually the body seems to have lightened up as it cools instead of what usually happens, where body seems to condense and get heavier in the cooling cup. Interesting. What does it all mean??! LOL
The lightly caramelized sugars are here in spades still, giving this coffee a nice base and a lot of sweetness. The raspberry comes through like raspberry candy because of this. There’s a bit of a peachiness to this coffee, which I ALWAYS love. It’s in the sweetness and there is a light peach note in the flavor, too. The hint of lime I was getting earlier seems to have gone away, but the florals are still here and I’m also getting a bit of a tea-like note that reminds me of Hugo Tea Company’s Champagne Long Kou, which is a really nice oolong tea. I know that’s a very specific reference. Now that I have peach on my mind the peach is really jumping out of this coffee for me. There’s a bit of white grape and some concord grade to the sweetness here for me, with that purple grape note coming through in the second half of the sip. This coffee finishes just on the sweet side of neutral and if I can stand to wait between sips, there is a hint of black tea in the aftertaste, which lingers forever.
This is a REALLY nice coffee and it’s a gulper for me, so I’m having to really conscientiously slow it down drinking it. Ethiopia is considered the birthplace of coffee and I am a big fan of washed and naturals from here. As far as naturals go, I’m getting pretty much no ferment, so if you avoid Ethiopian naturals because of that I think you could drink this coffee without a problem. This coffee has a lot of complexity but it super drinkable, too. I absolutely love it! Now, let’s see what Theodore’s has to say about it and see if my palate is accurate at all!
What Theodore’s Says About This Coffee
Theodore’s says this is a best-selling coffee for them and I believe it 100%. Their tasting notes are, “Black currant jam, blackberry soda, candied lavender, grape hyacinth, juniper berry, sugar plum tea, white peach” so some definite similarities between what they tasted on the cupping table and what I found in my cup. This coffee is a joy to drink and I can’t recommend it enough. SO good!
Will it ‘Spro?
And, finally, the age-old question and, yes, it will ‘spro! My sample of this coffee is pretty small so I didn’t want to burn a lot of it up experimenting with espresso, but I pulled a couple really nice shots in the typical 1:3-ish ratio using 19g dose and aiming for 35-40g in the cup. Timing is a little harder to talk about because I have manual flow/pressure profiling on my E61 machine and so with this coffee I was doing a relatively long pre-infusion, running the pump for a good 15 seconds to saturate the puck before I was getting anything in the cup yet, and then ramping up to about 8 bar, at least that’s what the group pressure gauge says, who knows what’s really going on in there. I definitely was leaning toward team pourover for this coffee but as I am typing this and getting the insane aftertaste from this shot I have pictured below, my confidence is eroding a little. This is definitely a bright, modern shot, but it’s not sour or bracing. In the espresso I got mainly blackberry and lime, but in the few minutes after the shot I am getting a truckload of peach and some mango, too. The aftertaste is definitely the winner with this espresso, for me. DELICIOUS!
