A Nice Cuppa

I???ve been waiting for my green coffee place to send me a nice fat bag of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, quite possibly the best coffee ever, but seeing as the Yirgacheffe is out of season right now, I was happy to have the Djimmah instead. My coffee preferences run to Africa and Asian as opposed to South America, and while I have a friend who likens all African coffee to tasting like dirt, it suits me just fine. I prefer my coffee roasted very dark, and the African beans tend to take that better.

Or that???s what I thought, until I met that bag of Djimmah.

Djimmah beans are hand-picked from single-origin estates in the south west part of Ethiopia, and are sun-dried. According to the Green Beanery website:

This sundried coffee comes to us from one of Ethiopia’s major coffee growing regions in the country’s southwest, an area with numerous indigenous varieties, many of them very highly prized but hard to market. Djimmah species, which are renowned for their high acidity and body, are thus not uniform in shape or colour, not graded highly, and greatly undervalued. This is the case with our Grade 5 offering.

For those not familiar with coffee grading, beans are sorted by defects. More than 86 defects in 300 grams of coffee garners a bean the lowest grade ??? a 5. This doesn???t mean that the coffee doesn???t taste amazing, but that the beans vary in size.

As you can see in the photo of my finished roast, the beans not only vary in size, but in color. The Djimmah beans roasted up extremely uneven, and though I let the roaster go for almost ten minutes (a typical dark roast is usually around 5 minutes) some beans are still almost green.

While this was frustrating at first, the erratic roast turned out to be a pleasant surprise. The blend of very dark and very light beans created a complex flavor that was both nutty and chocolatey at the same time.

Like most African beans, there was a great deal of chaff left behind ??? this is a good sign, because the chaff is the skin-like covering of the bean which can be bitter. The beans ground nicely to a medium dry crumbly consistency without much oil.

So while the Ethiopian Djimmah beans will never replace their neighbour, the delicious Yirgacheffe roasted to a double crack stage, the bean is a wonderful mellow treat from a part of Ethiopian that is not well known and which deserves the attention of coffee lovers.