Every year, we’ve featured a standout single origin coffee to celebrate the holidays. This time, we wanted to capture the holiday season and create a blend inspired by winter comforts and flavors. While taste triumphs, the most impressionable coffees always conjure memories, emotions, and feelings. Come Thanksgiving and Christmas, I begin to find myself at ease in sharing my last days of the year with loved ones while also feeling excitement for what’s to come in the new year. To evoke these emotions in a cup of coffee, I decided this blend needed to be simple to brew, but the coffee itself was anything but; it needs to be grounding enough to be a part of your daily routine but a little more brilliant and complex to make your morning cup more alluring.
I knew using a familiar coffee would be essential in this blend. The coffee produced by Bella Vista Women’s Group in Chiapas, Mexico, has, over the years, been consistently sweet and syrupy with a lovely citric acidity. It’s a coffee that Andytown customers are well acquainted with and eagerly await its return. It’s a reliable coffee that could provide a solid base for the blend.
BELLA VISTA WOMEN’S GROUP IN 2020
DINKINESH HIRBAYE (CENTER) WITH HER FAMILY
For the second component, I narrowed my focus to Ethiopia, a country renowned for producing some of the most radiant coffees. I made an extra effort to find a single producer lot, knowing that any Ethiopian coffee separated into a micro lot would be exceptional. That said, while it’s becoming less difficult, it’s still rare to find single-producer lots, and even more so from women producers; most coffee processing in Ethiopia is centralized due to a lack of infrastructure or inefficiencies at the farm level. I was lucky to snag the last few bags of a lot produced by Dinkinesh Hirbaye. With a well-organized, 8.2-hectare farm–an enormous amount of land compared to the average 1-hectare coffee farm in Yirgacheffe–she’s been able to implement more rigorous quality control measures, where cherries are closely inspected and sorted for ripeness and uniformity before being spread as a single layer on drying tables. It takes three weeks for this natural process coffee to dry. The meticulous attention to detail results in a coffee with a juicy flavor profile with cranberry, blackberry, and jasmine notes.
The next step was determining the perfect composition for this blend. Our Lead Roaster, Xander, and I tasted through several variations and worked together on a roasting strategy. To no surprise, an equal blend composition resulted in uneven flavors. Dinkinesh’s expressive coffee is overpowering in a 50/50 blend, but using too little of it and the round, syrupy body of the Bella Vista coffee dominates instead. The final blend has a higher Mexico-to-Ethiopia ratio, in which the two coffees enhance one another’s best attributes.
Aside from Xander and I, Xavier, our Kiosk Manager, was the first person Andytowner to share their thoughts on our first test roast. On a quiet morning, I brewed the blend on our home automatic coffee maker in the lab and poured Xavier a sample. At first sip, he nodded and said, “Hmmm,” with a smile. I interpreted this as, “Hey, not bad.” Soon after, he gently furrowed his eyebrows, said, “Wait, what is that?” and took another sip. And then another. His eyes widened as he said, “There’s this lingering feeling that’s staying high on the sides of my cheeks, and I can’t find the right words for it, but it’s good! I keep wanting to take another sip!” We don’t always get our test batches right on the first try, but it was encouraging that Xavier’s reaction is precisely the image I had in mind for an elevated daily drip!
Over the week, our QC and production team prepared the coffee using a few other brewing methods to see how this coffee changed. As a v60 pour-over, this coffee tends to brew quickly and highlights its brighter notes. However, this blend is much more dynamic on both our café batch brew and home auto dripper. Freshly brewed and piping hot, this coffee exhibits cranberry notes accompanied by baking spices. Give it a minute or two to cool, and the spice notes taper off and are replaced by juicy orange notes. The body becomes more silky and syrupy, like caramel sauce. We took our evaluations further by adding a splash of half and half to see how this coffee would change. Krista, one of our production roasters, said it reminded her of a Werther’s Original, and we couldn’t agree more!
I had a lot of fun bringing this blend to life and fine-tuning it with our team. Winter solstice–or Midwinter in Ireland–celebrates rebirth and the return of light. With its sweet and bright flavors, we named this blend after this festivity. Whether you drink it black, add some cream or sugar, or enjoy it solo or with company, we hope this coffee will shine some light on your holiday season!