Not the biggest fan of the coffee/wine analogy, but hear me out! We just launched a new washed Ethiopian coffee, Demeka Becha, and it got us thinking..
We’ve had this coffee once or twice before, and it’s only gotten more and more delicious with every iteration. Coming from the Demeka Becha washing station in Sidama, Ethiopia, this coffee is tropical, sparkly (effervescent??) juicy, full of florals, and is in our humble opinion a quintessential example of a high quality, clean and sweet, washed Ethiopian coffee. What the heck does all that even mean? It means you should give this coffee a try, and maybeee it’ll all make sense :)
Here’s a lil bit o’ info about what this coffee went through in Ethiopia before arriving at our roastery in Oregon. Once harvested, producers in the surrounding area deliver their cherry to the Demeka Becha site and are almost immediately floated in water, then pulped, and depending on their density, are directed to one of two tanks for fermentation - one dedicated to higher density beans, while the other to lower density beans. Some are separated out into this lovely lot, while others will be mixed together with other lots to form a community lot, and/or sold on the local market. Scope this for a more detailed description about this process. Once fermentation is donezo, the coffee is pushed through cement washing channels, which gets all that sweet and sticky mucilage off. Then, off to sun bathe on raised beds, before being transported to Addis Ababa for final processing (aka milling) and then export.
One more fun fact about this lot - it’s old.
This is where the wine analogy comes in. This coffee was grown and harvested in the 2021/2022 harvest year, which means it’s been sitting in its plastic-lined burlap sack for about two years at this point. Normally, this isn’t something to boast about in the coffee industry, where freshness is pursued sometimes to a fault. This time around, however, we'll be boasting for as long as we have this coffee on our menu.
Green coffee shelf life is a hot topic, and there’s a lot of strong opinions in this industry. The shelf life of green coffee depends on a few things: the health of the coffee plant, the post-harvest processing, and storage conditions, to name a few. The fact that this coffee sparkles and pops and reminds you of fruit candy two years later is a real testament to the attention and love this coffee received from everyone in the supply chain before Dapper & Wise bought and roasted it. For context, we’ve tried coffees that taste ‘old’ one week off the drying patios, but two years later, this coffee continues to shine.
We’re impressed, and hope you are too. Not because of how well we roast this coffee (we’re definitely not biased or anything, but we do think we did a really good job!), but with the work that everyone else involved in the making of this coffee has done, from farmers to processors to laborers, and everyone else in between. We’ll have this coffee available through the summer, so let’s keep rootin for it and see how long it continues to impress us all! At this point, we’re kinda expecting the quality to go up the longer we have it..