I’m a bit late on this one, it was a bit of a surprise release from us.
This is the first of our fresh crop Ethiopia’s that we’ll be getting this year. The bulk of the crop will be arriving around July/August.
This coffee came as a surprise, I reached out to see what was going on with the Australian importer Utopia Coffee. James and his team were one of the only importers to bring some Alo lots into the country last year, so I was curious.
Utopia got back to us quickly, sending samples for us to check out, and I was initially thinking the samples would be from last year. As, to my knowledge, Ethiopian coffee had not arrived via ship into Australia yet (at the time of writing this it still hasn’t). After cupping the samples, the vibrancy and aromatics were awesome, with this Anaerobic Washed lot being our favorite. Once we learned they were landed fresh crop coffees, I jumped to secure some.
This coffee was a great one to roast, with the Danche washing station and SNAP specialty coffee having excellent protocols. Extremely uniform green, and very high density.
Now onto the nerdy stuff.
For this coffee we chose to charge as hot as the coffee could take. A dense, high altitude washed Ethiopian coffee is a great candidate for max charge temp. This will help drive heat into the coffee, and cause some expansion later in the roast.
We chose to keep the drop temp around 200, with a short development time but not unusually so. 20 seconds is what we’re aiming for on this coffee, for intense acidity and elevated floral aromatics. The weight loss for this roast was 8.4%, so solidly within Ultra-light territory. I’m getting very intense floral bergamot and peachy stone fruit, huge lime like acid was well. No hints of underdevelopment or graininess. I personally think this is the sweet spot for my preference, developed enough to not have grain, but light enough to not have any real roaster influence.
For the Omni Profile, we lowered the charge temperature and did earlier gas adjustments to try and stretch out the middle of the roast. As well as add some extra development time to the end. I’m finding the extra development can really accentuate the stone fruit flavors, as well as maximise the acidity and black tea character, while sacrificing some florals and clarity. This roast was nearly 1 minute longer than the filter profile, and resulted in a Weight Loss of 9.71%. As you’ll see from the graph below, it roasted very similarly to the Light profile, just with added time to come up the extra degree in drop temp. Slight crash at the end of FC, this was our first and only Omni roast of this, and we chose to lower the gas at 20 seconds after FC, but we will probably omit this step in future roasts.
I’ve been looking forward to Ethiopia season all year, not only for the flavors, but because the way the coffees roast is different for us than other origins. Namely, South American larger screen size beans. Bigger beans, in general, will take more energy to heat. Because of this, we were experiencing a ceiling on the speed of our South American roasts. After receiving Danche, we started measuring bulk density of all the coffees we currently have, and reprofiled them according to volume in the roaster.
In theory we want to charge our roasting drum with the same volume of coffee, in terms of how much space the coffee will fill. The goal being to achieve similar roast metrics that we get with smaller, denser beans, on bigger and higher moisture content coffees.
In our previous blog post about the El Morito coffees I had mentioned that the speed of the roast was something we didn’t have a lot of flexibility around. Charging at 1.5kg, we were maxing out the power of the roaster and still only getting an 8+ minute roast. The curves were nice, and the coffee tasted good, but it would be great for us to have some extra options available. Especially, considering if I feel a roast is a little ‘brown’ or caramel-heavy.
This coffee has changed the way we approach roasting here at Anamorphic, and I’m very excited to see how our profile development and style shifts as we continue to get through the rest of this season and into more South American coffees.
This is one of the highlights of the year so far for us, with Ethiopia being one of our absolute favorite origins to drink coffee from. We’re very much looking forward to getting the rest of our contracted coffees in, as well as trying awesome lots from our favorite roasters!