S&W Craft Roasting Ethiopia Guji Tero Outgrowers Natural

Good morning and welcome to today’s review of a new coffee from my friends at S&W Craft Roasting. I’ve kept myself as blinded to this coffee as possible and so we get to take a look at whether my palate is worth a darn or not today, hope you enjoy! Anything that identifies this coffee was added in “post-production” after I had finished my notes and review, so obviously YOU know what this review is about, but I didn’t until the end.

S&W Craft Roasting website

Purchase this coffee directly for an unbelievable price of $16.40/16oz

S&W CRAFT ROASTING ETHIOPIA GUJI TERO OUTGROWERS NATURAL

Last week I received a box of about 6-8 coffees from my good friends at S&W Craft Roasting and this morning I randomly plucked one out and managed to brew up a cup all without looking at the label or having any clue whatsoever what I was drinking. I haven’t seen any spoilers on S&W’s website, I had no idea what they were sending me, and I didn’t get any glimpses on social media about what they are roasting, so I thought this would be a good opportunity for a totally blinded taste test. I blind all of my reviews, but mainly just through paying minimal attention to labels, coupled with having a bad memory, but in this case the photons from the label never even hit my eyes, so no possibility of repressed coffee memories back in the depths or anything!

S&W Craft Roasting have been around a little longer than KC Coffee Geek has, and I’ve reviewed a TON of Nick and Charlie’s coffees over the years. They do a fantastic job selecting and roasting world class coffees and making them available at an incredible value to you. No fancy websites, graphics, packaging or marketing, every dollar you spend goes into the coffee you’re receiving, not a $3 bag that you’ll toss in a week (although, I am a HUGE fan of fancy bags and coffee labeling and marketing, so I’m not disparaging that or roasters’ decisions to use them). S&W can get away with this to an extent because they are located in the tiny town of Coatesville, Indiana, outside of Indianapolis, so expenses are as low as they can get for a lot of things. Nick and Charlie put their profits back into the roastery, buying better equipment to make your next experience even better. People have trouble believing coffee of this quality is coming out of rural Indiana, but it’s true and they really embody the fact that you can roast coffee anywhere and make an amazing product if you put your mind to it.

My Review Notes
Opening the bag (with the label facing away so I have no idea what this coffee is) I see mostly small beans with a variety of screen sizes and I’m hit with an immediate sweet, fruity aroma with a bit of ferment to it. The beans are reddish in tone and look quite light in roast level. This is pretty obviously a natural process coffee, almost assuredly from Ethiopia. I’m using my standard brewing setup to prepare this coffee, which is a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. The Origin is a flat-bottom pourover device that uses Kalita 155 filters. I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize coffee bed agitation during brewing. My pourover grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. This coffee was pretty hard in the manual grinder, indicating a high altitude and light roast and backing up my initial thought that this is a natural Ethiopian coffee. In any case, I did a 30 second bloom and the total brew time for this coffee including the bloom was just under 4:00.

The aroma from this coffee is very floral and as the cup starts to cool I’m picking up on some strawberry and blueberry notes, too. If this isn’t a natural Ethiopian then it’s time for me to hang up my hat and give this work up! LOL Although I had better be careful making statements like this because if I’m wrong, I’ll look especially silly this morning! Taking my first sip this is a medium to medium+ bodied coffee that has a lot of fruit up front with a nice amount of chocolate coming through, too. At the front of the sip I’m getting berries… definitely strawberry and some raspberry here, too. Something weird happened to my palate a long time ago and I all but stopped tasting “blueberry” in Ethiopian naturals. I was told by Jeff Taylor, co-founder of PT’s Coffee and an OG in the specialty coffee world, that it was because my palate had developed to a better point, and I like to think that’s true, so that’s the narrative I stick with! LOL

Right behind those berry notes is a lot of sweetness… something caramel-like and light brown sugar-ish but not quite either of those things, exactly. It’s super delicious, either way. Oddly, for all the florals in the aroma I’m not picking them up in the flavor here. Toward the middle of the sip I’m getting great acidity that reminds me of lemon candy and it’s always a joy to find these sweet, acidic notes in natural Ethiopian coffees. Even though this citrusy acidity is associated with a candy-like sweetness to me, it provides a nice balance to the berries and sugary sweetness of the cup, making this a super easy drinker. The aftertaste lingers for a long time on this one and I do get more of a blackberry vibe, here. Blackberries, to my palate at least, seem to have a little more tartness and a floral note missing from the other common berry notes I find in coffee like strawberry, raspberry and blueberry. So, while I’m not really getting florals in the flavor, they’re coming through again in the long aftertaste, if I can stand to wait this long between sips! There is minimal ferment in this cup, for me, so if you like naturals but fermentation notes don’t do it for you, I think this coffee would work well for you. I’m a somewhat poor judge as I really enjoy the fermentation notes in natural coffees, so the funk doesn’t bother me in the least! Either way, though, I think this is pretty low in ferment notes.

What a great coffee! Tons of berry notes, well balanced, super easy to drink. Almost too easy, as I find myself all but chugging this coffee as it approaches room temp. I did pull a couple shots of espresso with this coffee and the florals and berries just erupted out of the cup. This makes a very complex single origin espresso that I really enjoyed. I’m definitely sticking with my presumption that this is an Ethipian natural process coffee. For me and how much coffee I taste compared to someone like a Q-grader or a roaster who is cupping coffees constantly, picking a region within Ethiopia is pretty much just a total random guess for a coffee like this, but I’m going to say it’s a Yirgacheffe. Something about that lemony acidity and the SLIGHTLY tea-like vibe I’m getting from the cup is speaking to me, but really, I have as good of a chance of predicting this as throwing a dart at a map of Ethiopia and going with that choice!

About the Coffee aka How Wrong Was I? 
Not very, as it turns out! 🙂 This randomly picked coffee this morning was S&W’s Ethiopia Guji Tero Outgrowers Natural. So, I guessed right on this being an Ethiopian natural, which would admittedly be very difficult for me to get wrong. As far as the region goes, it’s hard to say as Guji is a region to the west of Yirgacheffe, but my research says this coffee comes from around Shakiso, which is like 60-70 miles (as the crow flies) to the SE of Yirgacheffe. And Google Maps says this is a 4+ hour drive, which should tell you how tough the terrain is there! I certainly don’t want to pat myself on the back too much as the Yirgacheffe guess was just that, a guess, but I was darn close if I do say so myself! LOL

As far as tasting notes and other info, S&W say this “light bodied, clean, vibrant cup boasts aromas of watermelon bubblegum and flavors of mixed jelly – (blackberry, apple, grape, strawberry, pear… you know – like those single serve packs at the diner.” They also say this makes a “smooth, subtle shot” as espresso and my samples were anything but subtle, but I also used a LONG pre-infusion at a low pressure and slowly built to 8 bars using the pressure profiler on my machine. There are so many variables to espresso there’s no way the S&W gang and I are even remotely pulling the same thing! I think they have a Decent machine, too, so they have a lot more control than the manual pressure profiling I do. Either way, yes, it will ‘spro!

This is a natural process coffee coming from the Shakiso Tero smallholder farmers growing their crops at 1800-2200masl. In Ethiopia, it’s very common for farmers to have very small plots of land. They typically work in cooperatives with hundreds, if not thousands, of other farmers in the area to pool their coffees together at local washing stations owned by the co-op. This way they can combine their coffees into large lots and further sort and process them, where the yield of one smallholder farmer would otherwise be maybe a couple bags of coffee (commercial size, not the 12 ounces you and I buy!). Tero Farm and their partner, Dimtu Coffee, have a registration and training process for their farmers, so they are doing a lot more than simply buying coffee cherries from the locals.

Top notch Ethiopian coffees like this seem to run around $19-$22 per 12oz bag in the KC area, so the fact that S&W provides this coffee at $16.40 for a true 1 lb (16 oz) bag is proof of how much value this brand is. Don’t sleep on this coffee if you love Ethiopian naturals. It’s a banger!