Origins on Midnight Bloom Coffee

Circasia Galaxy Hops Mossto Gesha

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0800

Edwin Noreña is one of a handful of Colombian producers treating fermentation as a controllable variable rather than a step to get through. This lot is the clearest example of that on our roster, and probably the most divisive coffee we sell.

What was done to it

The cherry goes through carbonic maceration twice, sealed in a tank flooded with CO₂, where fermentation runs without oxygen and produces a different set of acids and esters than an open-air ferment would. Between those two stages it’s dosed with mossto: the concentrated juice pressed from coffee mucilage, in this case infused with Galaxy hops.

Wolde Hirbe

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0800

If you want to understand what natural processing does, drink this next to the Aricha washed lot. Same country, similar altitude, heirloom varieties in both. Almost everything separating them in the cup comes down to what happened in the first week after picking.

Raised beds, and why they matter

Natural process means the cherry dries whole, fruit still attached, and the seed takes on flavour from the pulp fermenting around it. Done badly this produces mould, over-ferment, and a cup that tastes like compost. Done well it produces the most intensely fruited coffee on earth.

Adorsi Washed Kurume

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0800

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.

Ubuto Washing Station

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0800

Burundi is landlocked, small, and sits in the shadow of Rwanda and Ethiopia in almost every conversation about East African coffee. The coffee itself deserves much better than that, and this lot is the case in point.

Double washing

Standard washed processing ferments the seed once to break down the mucilage, then rinses. Double washing, common in Burundi and Rwanda, runs a second, shorter soak in clean water after the first ferment, typically overnight.

Mbale Mountain Harvest

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0800

Uganda exports more coffee than almost anywhere in Africa, and the overwhelming majority of it is robusta headed for instant coffee and cheap blends. The arabica grown on the Mount Elgon slopes around Mbale is a completely different proposition and still trades at a discount largely because of the country’s reputation.

That’s a sourcing opportunity, and this is the lot that proves it.

Growing on a volcano

Mount Elgon is an extinct shield volcano on the Kenyan border, with deep volcanic soils and reliable rainfall. Farms sit high. High enough that the cherry ripens slowly, which concentrates sugars in the seed. The coffee is washed on raised beds by smallholder groups organised into an organic-certified cooperative structure.

Esther Fernández Mondragón

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0800

Farmgate means the price was negotiated with the producer at her farm rather than set by an exporter working from the commodity market. For a smallholder in Cajamarca that difference is substantial, and it’s the main reason we buy Peruvian coffee this way even though it’s more work than the alternative.

Why Peru is underrated

Peruvian coffee has a reputation for being pleasant and unremarkable: the coffee you put in a blend to add body without adding a point of view. That reputation comes from decades of the country’s crop being sold as anonymous organic bulk.

Galo Morales

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0800

Ecuador produces almost no coffee by regional standards. The country consumes most of what it grows and exports a rounding error compared to Colombia next door. What does leave tends to be very good, because the only producers bothering with the export paperwork are the ones with something worth exporting.

Sidra, and anaerobic washing

Sidra is the interesting half of this lot. It’s a relatively recent Ecuadorian variety, generally understood to descend from a Bourbon–Typica cross with Ethiopian landrace material somewhere in its history. It produces a cup much closer to a Gesha than its parentage suggests, at a fraction of a Gesha’s price.

Juan Peña

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 11:00:00 -0800

The counterpoint to the Pichincha lot: same country, no fermentation tricks at all. Juan Peña picks ripe, pulps promptly, ferments in open tanks, and dries on raised beds. It’s the process almost everyone used before anaerobic tanks became fashionable, executed carefully.

Saraguro

Saraguro sits in Loja province near the Peruvian border, an Indigenous Kichwa highland region better known for textiles than for coffee. Farms are small and high, and coffee is generally one crop among several rather than a monoculture.