August’s MyCoffeePub.com subscription features Mississippi roaster, BeanFruit Coffee Co., and it has been a long time since I’ve tasted BeanFruit’s coffee, so I’m ready to dive in!
Purchase this coffee directly for $16/12oz
MYCOFFEEPUB.COM AUGUST 2018: BEANFRUIT COFFEE CO. ETHIOPIA GUJI URAGA
I knew it had been “a while” since I’d tasted any coffee from Jackson, Mississippi roaster, BeanFruit Coffee Co., but when I searched the site it turns out it was exactly two years ago tomorrow that I wrote my latest review of their beans! Wow, does time fly or what?! My buddies at MyCoffeePub.com selected BeanFruit for this month’s subscription and so I was really happy to see that, as well as some updated packaging since the last time I saw anything from BeanFruit. For those of you who are unfamiliar with MyCoffeePub.com, it’s a subscription service where I receive one bag of coffee per month, usually in the 3rd week of the month, and it’s whatever the curators have chosen. They have always done a super job and found a nice mix of well known roasters as well as very small or new roasters, and I love the monthly surprise of not knowing what was shipped until I open that bag!
BeanFruit was founded by owner and roaster, Paul Bonds. He started doing some home roasting around 2009 and then, like so many other people in this industry, he picked up a small commercial roaster and started selling coffee at the local farmers market while maintaining a full time job to pay the bills. Paul eventually picked up a couple of wholesale accounts and then made the leap of faith in 2012 to leave his job and make BeanFruit his main gig. Paul earned a Good Food Award in 2015 and back during the time I was reviewing quite a bit of BeanFruit coffee, I knew if a package from Missisippi landed on my door that it was going to be great, no matter where the beans were from.
This morning’s coffee is an Ethiopian selection, the origin that got Paul interested in coffee in the first place. This morning’s coffee is heirloom varietals grown by smallholder farmers around the town of Haro Wachu in the Uraga District… the famed Guji region of Ethiopia where some of the best washed coffees come from, in my opinion. About 500 smallholder farmers in this area, growing on plots of 1/2 hectare on average, pool their coffee at the Layo Taraga washing station for processing. This is a washed coffee that was depulped and fermented underwater for 2-3 days. After washing the coffee is soaked for 8-16 additional hours and then dried on raised beds. Growing altitude in this part of Ethiopia is 1950-2200masl. BeanFruit gives us tasting notes of, “Juicy, citrus, floral, complex.”
I’m using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin brewer. I’m using Kalita 155 filters and a Knock Aergrind. I did a 30 second bloom on this and then the brewing itself took another 3:10.
Taking a sip, I’m greeted by a light-bodied coffee that has a lot of intensity of flavor and seems to really drill into my palate. BeanFruit’s first descriptor, “juicy,” is exactly right! What does this word mean in the context of coffee? For me, juicy is a feeling that gets me wanting to take another sip right away. It hits my cheeks and the sides of my tongue and encourages salivation. It’s like biting into a super ripe peach. It’s a sensation that washes over my entire palate. That may not help much, but that’s “juicy” and this coffee has it in spades! There is a lightly syrupy sweetness to this coffee with lots of bright fruit flavors complementing and balancing it. I’m getting a good amount of peach flavors and hints of apricot (for me, not much different from peach except there is a little bit of tartness associated with apricot, in my opinion) in the cup. There’s a very nice lime acidity to this coffee and, for me, lime is always associated with a bit of bitterness. In this case it adds a lot of complexity and dimension to the coffee… a sense of “depth,” if you will. This coffee finishes sweet but leaves a dry texture on my palate, giving me a sense of black tea, like so many washed Ethiopian coffees do. The aftertaste lingers for a long time and there are elements of lime, bitterness, peach and apricot and some floral notes, too.
This is a KILLER coffee! I love everything about it and it’s great to see that in the two years since I had coffee from BeanFruit things have only gotten better from their already high standard!