🇪🇹 Adorsi Washed Kurume

This is the coffee we hand people who say they don’t like light roasts. It is about as classical as Yirgacheffe gets, and it makes the argument for washed Ethiopian coffee better than any explanation would.

Kurume, and the grading

Kurume is one of the heirloom varietal groups found across the Yirgacheffe area: small, dense beans, typically cupping with more floral and citrus character than the larger-seeded types. Grade 1 is the top of the Ethiopian scale, meaning almost no defects in a 300-gram sample. That matters more than it sounds: a handful of defective beans is enough to drag a whole batch toward the muddy end.

Washed processing strips the fruit off within hours of picking and ferments the seed in water to remove the remaining mucilage. There’s nowhere for the coffee to hide afterward. Everything you taste came from the seed itself, the soil, and the altitude.

What it tastes like

Bergamot, first and clearly: the Earl Grey note. Then lemon rather than orange, jasmine, and a black-tea structure through the finish that’s more about texture than flavour. The body is light and the acidity is bright but rounded, never sharp.

Clean is the operative word. If your cup tastes muddy or flat, that’s a brewing problem, not the coffee.

How we roast it

Light-medium, aiming for the clearest expression of the acidity without leaving it underdeveloped and grassy. Dense high-grown beans need real energy through the drying phase or the centre never catches up with the surface. We charge hotter than for a natural, then ease through Maillard and drop shortly after first crack.

Brewing it

Made for pour-over. V60 at 1:16, water at 94–96 °C (the higher end of the range), because delicate florals need the heat to come out. Also exceptional as cold brew if you want the tea character without the acidity, though it’s an expensive way to make cold brew.