Sideyard Coffee: October 22 - Ethiopia 🇪🇹 Natural + What is Q Grading?
Hello Sideyard Friends,
Thanks to everyone who made it out to the open house last Saturday! It was really nice to connect faces to names (and addresses) and we had a great time roasting coffee, drinking coffee, and chatting with you all. Same time, same place next fall?!
This week's coffee is a dry process Ethiopia from the Western Guji zone. It's comprised of coffee from hundreds of extremely small holder farms around the town of Dambi Uddo. Due to incredibly careful sorting and processing, however, it roasts evenly and has a pretty clean tasting profile for a natural coffee. The palate acidity is moderate and much more noticeable when it's hot. As it cools, the acidity rounds off and it becomes a really nicely balanced cup with notes of chocolate and ripe fruit (chocolate banana?) that, for me, make it an easy drinker. It's far less fruit-forward than the Papua New Guinea from a few weeks ago, and it's on an entirely different planet from the dark and brooding Sumatra we had last week. If you're already missing that Sumatra btw, we have a few 12oz/$12 bags available. Reply here if you want one.
In the speciality coffee world there's something called the Q Grade System that's used to help determine the relative quality of any given coffee. Coffees get evaluated by one of roughly 5,000 certified Q Graders around the world on a 100 point scale. Under 80 points = commodity coffee, over 80 = speciality coffee. Like with wine, if a coffee scores under 80, you're simply not going to hear about it. :) Also like wine, I think we're going to be seeing more and more consumer-facing scores (on bags or coffee menus for instance) in the years to come. Most of the coffees we're buying for Sideyard fall somewhere between an 85 and 90, but we try not to obsess too much over numbers when picking out coffees. For what it's worth, this week's Ethiopia was rated at a 91. That 90+ score made me a little more nervous than average at the roaster this week (justifiably or not), but I trust that we managed to do right by the farmers and workers who brought us such a delicious crop!
Cheers,
Ryan
References:
https://sca.coffee
https://www.kqed.org/bayareabites/112633/what-is-the-q-grader-coffee-system-and-what-does-it-mean-for-your-morning-cup