Ethiopia Guji Hambela Dabaye

Delicious and delicate, this wet-processed lot from Hambela Dabaye delivers impressive sweetness, with bright fruits and aromatic accents in the City-City+ roast range. The dry grounds smelled of fragrant white honey and burnt sugar, light hints of berry juice, and ginger tea. A more intense aromatic profile emerges from the wetted grounds, and running my spoon through the coffee crust releases a potent mix of raw sugars, honey, with syrupy pear, and floral tea. Our City roast produced mouth-cleansing flavors, refined and a bit juicy, with aromatic grace notes that play off pronounced sweetness underneath. The cup sweetness has layers of simple syrup, maple, and a fragrant white honey note in the finish. As the coffee cools down some, I pick up on more of the fruited flavors like nectarine, orange marmalade, and pear, along with perfumed floral highlights, like jasmine and rose water. The acidic impression has elements of tart citrus that are well integrated into the sweetness. Much of the coffee character can be described as light and delicate, and you should give it a light treatment in the roaster too. Pulling 1 minute and 30 seconds after the start of 1st Crack is not too soon! The coffee coloring might look slightly mottled and uneven, but it's where we've found some of the liveliest pour-over brews.