Good morning and welcome to today’s review of an Ethiopian natural currently available from Starved Rock Coffee Co. I’ve been enjoying this coffee for a few weeks and loving it! Also, a quick update, the Nicaragua Finca un Regalo de Dios I reviewed a couple weeks ago is back in stock, so definitely pick up a bag of that, too, if it’s in your budget!
Purchase this coffee directly from Starved Rock for $21/12oz
Other reviews in this series: Nicaragua Finca un Regalo de Dios
STARVED ROCK COFFEE CO. ETHIOPIA HAMASHO NATURAL
Starved Rock Coffee Co. was founded by Matt and Jill McLaughlin (and their 5 kids!) in 2017. Located in the Illinois Valley area that is to the west/southwest of Chicago, they named their coffee company after Starved Rock State Park which is about 2 hours from downtown Chicago and a popular natural refuge for people needing a break from the city. Matt and Jill were kind enough to send me two of their “top shelf” coffees recently, today’s Ethiopian natural and their Nicaraguan Pacamara I reviewed a couple weeks ago (which is available on the site again and is a must-buy! They had run out of bags or labels at the time I published that review, but it’s back on the shelf now and there’s a link above that will take you straight to it on Starved Rock’s site).
This morning’s coffee is a natural Ethiopian coffee. I’ve managed to do a great job ignoring the label and not looking at the website even though the bag is now empty, so I’m excited to compare my tasting notes with Starved Rock’s. As always, I’ll put all the details about the coffee right after my tasting notes so I don’t bias my palate. What I can tell you about this coffee right now is that it is a natural or dry process coffee, meaning the coffee cherries are picked, then sorted, and then laid out on raised mesh beds with the fruit still totally intact. The fruits start to dry out and break down over the next few weeks while workers circulate and turn the fruits on a regular basis to prevent rotting from occurring. As this process unfolds, the seeds inside the coffee cherries, what we call coffee “beans,” absorb all sorts of things from the breaking down fruits surrounding them that gives them a lot of unique character. Generally speaking, natural coffees are sweet and tend to have a heavier body than their washed counterparts (washing removes the fruits from the seeds/beans and then they are laid out to dry “naked”). Ethiopian naturals are famously fruity with lots of berry flavors. Everyone chases the blueberry bombs, but I mostly taste strawberry, raspberry and less frequently, blackberry, in coffees these days. This one had all three for me! Let’s jump into my tasting notes and then we’ll explore the details of this coffee.
I am using my standard pourover method for this coffee, which uses a 1:16.6 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water. I use a Trinity Origin dripper, which utilizes Kalita’s 155 size Wave filters and is a flat-bottom, three-hole brewer like a Wave. I pulse pour my coffee through a Melodrip to minimize agitation of the coffee bed during brewing. My grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido E. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and brewed, including the bloom, in 4:15 from start to finish.
My Tasting Notes
The aroma from this cup is screams “I’m an Ethiopian natural!!!” with super ripe strawberries that are beginning to ferment dominating the nose as well as random hints of chocolate coming through. Taking a sip, this is a medium-heavy to heavy bodied coffee for me that feels like drinking a stout almost. In the initial sips I’m getting a nice dark chocolate note that spreads out over my tongue like melting chocolate as well as those berries from the aroma. There’s a dairy-like sweetness here for me, like sweetened milk or a milkshake kind of thing, and I think the heavy body accentuates this dairy vibe since the coffee sits heavy on my palate like dairy, too. As the cup is cooling and my palate is attenuating, I’m getting more of a sweeter, milk chocolate impression from the chocolatey notes in this cup and a bit of roastiness comes through on some sips. Very ripe strawberry is coming through as the dominant fruit note, but I’m getting raspberry, too, especially in the second half of the sip. There is a little more acidity and a lemony note in the finish along with this berry component to the flavor and that always reads as blackberry to my brain, so there is some nice complexity in the berry notes here if you give this coffee a chance to cool down and open up. This cup finishes sweet with no astringency and while there is acidity to balance all this sweetness out this is what I think a lot of people would consider a “low acidity” coffee. The fruit notes are somewhat dark and sweet, representing fruits that are late in their life cycle and starting to break down rather than fresh, vibrant fruits with a more acidic and bright punch. This also means there is a good amount of ferment to this cup, which I really enjoy and prefer in natural coffees, but is not something every coffee drinker loves. This is an extremely easy-drinking coffee and it’s hard not to take big gulps and almost chug it for me! As I drank my last big gulp of this coffee at room temp I got some grape soda vibes I hadn’t noticed in the warmer cup, and even minutes later there is a lingering berry jam and grape soda that I can’t shake from my palate in the aftertaste (nor would I want to!).
On a side note, I actually drank most of this bag as espresso. As a single origin coffee it was quite nice, very modern and bright with lots of berry jam and lime notes coming through. I had a handful of other single origin coffees on deck around the time I received this, so I mainly played with adding this to other coffees in my espresso shots and doing some improvisational blending. This worked well with the Nicaraguan from Starved Rock, and it was nice with a Colombian coffee of my own that I had roasted. Adding about 5-7g of this Hamasho natural to another coffee brought out some nice berries and acidity while still retaining some balance from the base coffee.
More About This Coffee
Alright, the moment of truth where I get to compare my tasting notes to Starved Rock’s! Their bag notes say, “Light roast with a winey acidity and notes of blueberry, grape and lime zest.” Not bad, we differed on our impression of the berries but I definitely got grape soda (not exactly the same as grape, but not NOT grape either! LOL) in the cup and while I got more lemon than lime in my brewed cup, lime was a central feature of this coffee as espresso, so I feel pretty validated with regard to my palate. As I said before, this is a natural processed coffee and it geows in the Hamasho area at a staggering 2300+ meters above sea level. Hamasho is an unfamiliar name for me, so looking that up shows that it’s a village in the Sidamo region, which is a well-known coffee producing region famous for both naturals and washed coffees alike. As is the arrangement for most specialty coffee coming out of Ethiopia, this particular lot comes from a washing station that serves 1500+ smallholder farmers in the area. In Ethiopia, it’s common for farmers to have anywhere from a handful of coffee trees in their yard to very small plots they tend, so they work in co-ops that are served by a washing station. The washing station is the central collection point where farmers bring their coffees during harvest, and all of these tiny lots of coffee are combined, sorted and processed into the lots that are eventually sold to roasters.
This is a really great example of a natural Ethiopian coffee and I highly recommend it to anyone who is a natural fan. Super good!