Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a natural Ethiopian coffee from Kansas City locals, Notion Coffee! Sluuuuurp!
Purchase this coffee directly from Notion for $19/10oz
Other reviews in this series: Anatomy Espresso | Tundra Holiday Blend
NOTION COFFEE ETHIOPIA DUMERSO NATURAL
At the end of 2021 I had the opportunity to visit new-to-me Notion Coffee and meet the co-owners, talk to one of them named Johnathan, and check out what turned out to be a very compact operation with big aspirations! Notion is based in Grandview, Missouri, which is is part of the insanely sprawling Kansas City metro area and is abhout 20 minutes or so south of the city proper. The owners of Notion worked for Cafe Main in Grandview who were around from about 2011-2018ish. When Cafe Main closed, Johnathan and his brother bought the company and moved operations to the campus of International House of Prayer in Grandview. In 2021 they re-branded the cafe space as “prefix.” and they roast coffee under the name, Notion Coffee. They have some nice wholesale accounts in the area, one of which is one of my favorite places I recently discovered, Billie’s Grocery, which is a must to experience if you are gluten-free. Prefix has a big space at IHOP and Notion Coffee is tucked into a couple hundred square feet in a room at the back. They were roasting around 300lbs of coffee per week on a little 2.5kg roaster, if my memory serves me right, and green storage, packaging and shipping were all being done right there, too. Proof that you can do a lot with a little space. Johnathan said they were a few months out from moving to a much, MUCH bigger roasting space, so I will need to check back in with them in the spring and see how things are going.
Notion left me with three coffees, and links to the other two reviews are above. Their Anatomy Espresso was bright and modern and their Tundra holiday blend was one of the most adventurous and memorable coffees I’ve had for a LONG time. It’s a really funky, in-your-face blend that is dominated by the two natural process components and I absolutely loved it. Today’s coffee is a single origin natural from Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia, believed to be the literal birthplace of coffee, so my expectations are high and let’s jump right into my brewing and tasting notes so I don’t bias my palate. We’ll see more about the coffee at the end of the review…
My Notes
I am using my usual pourover method for this cup and I did find that the brew ran long, even after loosening my grinder settings a smidge. This is a pretty heavy and dense coffee, so don’t be surprised if you have to go up a couple steps in coarseness to account for that. I am using a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin brewer. This is a three-hole, flat bottom dripper like a Kalita Wave or similar and also uses Kalita 155 filters. Grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3 and I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize coffee bed agitation. I did a 35 second bloom and the total brew time including the bloom came out to 5 minutes, which is about a minute longer than I was aiming for.
The aroma from the brewer has some nice lightly burned sugar notes for me. In the cup, the aroma is settling into a bit of caramel with some florals and hints of lime which I’m really enjoying. You may need to give the aroma time to settle down. I wasn’t getting much from it until maybe 3-4 minutes after brewing, so let some of the other things “boil off” and what’s left in the slightly cooler cup is really nice. Taking my first sips, I can tell already that this isn’t going to hit like the “classic” Ethiopian natural berry bomb, and I’m getting a lot of chocolate and some biscuit notes up front here. I’ll let it cool down and develop a little and see what that brings me. Giving the cup a little time to cool, my sips are giving me some very nice and unexpected flavors for an Ethiopian natural. There is a “clean” sweetness here that is hard to describe. I want to say “honey like” but I’m not sure that’s accurate. It’s sweet, but the sweetness is somewhat neutral and doesn’t have a flavor of its own, per se, like “brown sugar” or “caramel” or something like that. It’s perfectly balanced in that it’s sweet but has no cloying, either. On top of that I’m getting a really nice lime note that reads more as a flavor and less as an acidity component (even though that lime flavor note IS coming from acids in the coffee) in this coffee. I’m getting a bit of lime zest but more of a Sprite or 7-Up type note here that carries through the entire sip from start to finish. For me, the ferment is light in this coffee and comes out just a bit in the aftertaste, so people who don’t love ferment will probably do OK with this coffee, in my opinion. The cooler cup has less chocolate for me than it did right off brewing, but there is a hint of milk chocolate in the background here for me nonetheless. As the cup cools even more I’m getting a bit more brightness and acidity with that lime flavor note. Most people associate Ethiopian naturals with berry flavors and for my palate, I’m picking up on hints of blueberry but mainly blackberry here, which works perfectly with that lime note. This coffee finishes clean and slightly sweet with a hint of umami and the aftertaste lingers like a lime candy on my palate for as long as I can make it before going in for another sip. And that’s not long at all! Once this cup cooled down, I found myself taking rapid and large sips, so it’s a bit of a chugger for me! This is an extremely balanced and easy-drinking coffee and this would make a great all-day cup for the people who like to stretch their coffee intake out through the day. At $19 for 10oz this is not an inexpensive coffee but it is well worth it.
A Closer Look at The Coffee
Taking a closer look at the coffee details on Notion’s site, this is a natural process coffee of multiple varieties that’s grown in the Kebele Dumerso district of the Yirgacheffe region. Ths coffee is collected and processed as a washing station in the region that’s owned by Hirut Berhanu, a woman with over 15 years of experience. Hirut employs close to 300 workers with 95% of them also being women, and she collects and processes coffee from over 750 smallholder farmers in the region. That’s probably a lot of words that may not mean much to some of you readers, so I’ll parse that out in the next paragraph below. This lot from Notion has a growing altitude of 1860-1900masl (meters above sea level) and Notion says, “Famously known for their sweet aromatics and blueberry-like flavor, natural Ethiopian coffees, particularly from Yirgacheffe, have become an icon of specialty coffee. We feel like Dumerso truly captures the iconic taste that natural Ethiopian coffees are known for. We taste notes of pear, blueberry and cocoa.” I didn’t pick up on the pear note they mentioned in their flavor notes, but in retrospect that would be a good descriptor for that “clean sweetness” I tried to describe at the beginning of my tasting notes.
Alright, so what do all these words mean in describing this coffee? Natural process is a method of processing coffee from it’s fruit form into those little brown beans in the bag that we grind up and extract into what’s in the cup. Coffee is a fruit and the cherries are about the size of a normal cherry. There are usually two seeds inside, what we usually call coffee “beans.” Natural processed coffees are also called “dry process” and these are picked and hand sorted by laborers, then the whole coffee cherries with the seeds still inside are laid out on raised mesh beds in the sun to slowly dry out and breakdown. Workers circulate the fruit regularly to make sure the process happens evenly and to prevent rot or other unpleasant things from happening. As the fruits break down, the seeds inside are like little sponges and soak up all sorts of chemicals from the drying process. Ethiopian naturals classically have a lot of berry flavors like strawberry, raspberry and the sought-after blueberry, but lemon-lime, florals, cocoa or chocolate are also common in these coffees. The downside to natural processing is that you get some fermentation notes, too. I personally LOVE ferment notes in coffee, but some unlucky people perceive this fermentation as rotting garbage, and so they steer clear of naturals. If you are unsure what “ferment” tastes like in coffee, get a bag of Notion’s Tundra and that will answer all your questions! It is the most fermented coffee I’ve had in years and I personally love it.
So, that’s the process in a nutshell. In Ethiopia, most of the specialty coffee is grown on very small plots of land by smallholder farmers. As such, these farmers work in cooperatives or ally with a “washing station” in the area. These stations are where farmers bring their coffee cherries and they are combined and sorted into larger lots that are processed together and sold in the big bags that eventually make it into the hands of roasters. So many varieties of coffee grow in Ethiopia that they are often just called “heirloom varieties” and the beans in any particular bag of coffee could be from dozens of different farmers, most of the time. Yirgacheffe is a city and region of Ethiopia where about 90% of the population is involved with the coffee trade and it’s considered to be the literal birthplace of coffee. Yirgacheffe is world-famous for both natural and especially washed coffees (a differet process where the beans are separated from the fruit right away) and Yirgacheffe washed coffees are some of the most delicate and tea-like coffees I’ve had. There you go, a crash course in coffee!