Sideyard Coffee: December 18 - Ethiopia Dry Process 🇪🇹 + Cascara Coffee Cherry Tea!
Dear Sideyard Friends,
This week's coffee comes from a collection of a few hundred very small farms near the Bobea Uke processing station in the Western Guji region of Ethiopia. It's cool to see this sourcing come through in the roasted beans via varied bean sizes and slightly uneven color or 'roast development'. It's a dry process lot with some earthiness, moderate acidity, and flavor notes of strawberry, cocoa. Full immersion brewing mutes up some of the fruitiness, while pour over helps it shine. Barring a subscriber mutiny, these dry process Ethiopian coffees will continue to occupy a regular slot in the rotation.Â
Alongside this week's coffee, I delivered a small bag of coffee cherry tea as a gift of appreciation for subscribers. A fifth generation Salvadorian coffee grower named Aida Batlle is credited with popularizing this tea, which she dubbed 'cascara' after the Spanish name for the skin or peel a fruit. This is exactly what it is–the husk of the coffee cherry. It has roughly 25% of the caffeine content of coffee, but with the naturally occurring sugars it sometimes feels like a bit more of a jolt than that.
You can brew it hot or cold and there's really no way to goof it up. I've been brewing it hot at a ratio of 10g cascara to 350g water (~1/4 cup to 1 1/2 cups) with an 8-10 minute steep. Flavors include tamarind, apple, raisin, and black tea-like tannins. When I tried adding cream and sugar something went a little wonky with the flavor–so my recommendation is to drink it straight. I think the best application might be cold brewed iced tea, but with the weather what it is currently, I haven't had a chance to try it. If you're neither a fan of fruity tea-like concoctions, nor impressed by it's purported health benefits (antioxidant/anti-inflammatory), I hope the novelty of tea made from coffee proves entertaining.
With the Christmas holiday falling on next Friday, I thought it might be nice to get deliveries out a day or two early next week. I'm aiming for Wednesday. If you're interested in ordering any last minute coffee gifts, please let me know in the next couple days.
Cheers,
Ryan
—
Ryan Thompson | Sideyard CoffeeÂ
instagram.com/sideyardcoffeeÂ
not to be confused with the Cascara tree, whose bark is known for its laxative properties.Â
**https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2015/12/01/456796760/cascara-tea-a-tasty-infusion-made-from-coffee-waste