Blind Assessment

Bizarre, beautiful, shocking, intricate. Tropical fruit (lychee, passionfruit), sweet herb (clove, cilantro, dill, spearmint), dark chocolate, musk, yogurt. In structure quite sweet, roundly tart (think unsweetened yogurt), deeply savory. Lightly syrupy in mouthfeel. Passionfruit, chocolate, dill all make distinct appearances in the drying but sweetly and richly complex finish.

Notes

This exceptional coffee was selected as the No. 10 coffee on Coffee Review’s list of the Top 30 Coffees of 2019. This coffee also earned the highest rating in a cupping of coffees produced using reduced oxygen (“anaerobic”) processing methods for Coffee Review’s November 2019 tasting report. The intensity and complexity of this extraordinary coffee are owing both to tree variety and processing method. The variety is the rare Ethiopia-derived botanical variety Geisha (also spelled Gesha). Joseph Brodsky and his colleagues processed this Geisha at Ninety Plus Gesha Estates in Panama using a refined and innovative processing procedure involving fermenting the whole, freshly-picked coffee fruit at high temperatures using a special yeast strain before drying it, still in the whole fruit. Willoughby’s Coffee & Tea is a pioneer specialty coffee roaster established in the early 1980s that has gracefully and successfully moved with the  times and now offers a menu of extremely refined small-lot, single-origin coffees. Visit www.willoughbyscoffee.com or call 800-388-8400 for more information.

Bottom Line

A lush, juicy, tropical natural-processed profile overlaid on a deep, spicy/savory profile with something else as well, an edge we might associate with fermented foods like yogurt or pickles. Clearly for coffee adventurers.

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