Ardi

If you follow us on Twitter or Facebook you've heard us mention that we're now roasting Ethiopia Sidama Ardi in the shop. Our first roast was Friday. It was a hit at the Farmers@Firehouse market. Our whole bean customers should love this coffee as well.

So what's the big deal about this coffee?

It's an extremely well-processed natural (dry process) coffee.

Many coffee drinkers are familiar with Ethiopia Harrar, a region well-known for its dry process coffees that often taste like blueberry. Unfortunately, many Harrars can also often taste like dreck because some farms and mills are better than others. And just having "Harrar" on the label tells you nothing about who's doing the picking, sorting and drying of your beans.

Natural processing is called "dry process" because there's much less water used. Instead of washing off the cherry fruit from the bean as in wet processing, with dry processing the entire cherry is left out in the sun to dry. Once dried, all layers are removed in one depulping pass, leaving only the bean.

It's a tricky process as beans have to dry out at the same rate in order to maintain quality from cup to cup. Too short a time and you get funk. Too long a time and you get a dried-out tasteless bean. And far too often you'll find both in bags of commercial-quality Harrar.

Not with Ardi. The processing is exquisite. Thus, the flavors in the cup, while still fruit-forward, are sophisticated, multi-layered, balanced and most of all, consistent. The cup has structure - it's delicious from the time it's poured right through cooling to room temperature.

We expect to be able to offer Ardi throughout the summer. Samuel Demisse, who runs Keffa Coffee in Baltimore and is the exclusive importer, has been very helpful in working with us and noted that small shops like ours who really appreciate what coffees like Ardi are about are his favorite customers to work with. So we hit it off with Samuel right away.

His office is small, but he's got as many brewing toys as we do, including stuff we still don't have (e.g. metal Aeropress screens). No visit is complete without a tasting (or two or three). Samuel's roster of clients is like a who's who of the top end of the specialty coffee market.

We've been wanting this coffee since being gifted a bag we from master roaster Trish Rothgeb of Wrecking Ball coffee. Two things about the coffee that wowed us from the start - the flavor and the fact that it was an incredibly light roast - a roast level that would typically signal sour, grassy and herbal notes from a lesser coffee.

We kept a small sample of that roast for our library. Achieving that roast level has been our "Holy Grail". And while this year's berry acidity flavor profile is different than last year's citrus-chocolate, we think we're pretty close with our initial efforts.

Ardi will be offered by the cup via Clever or press pot for as long as we have it in stock (hopefully all summer). We'll be serving it as our single origin espresso starting today. We'll also have it in whole bean for home brewing. And at least once, maybe more, we'll batch brew it as the day's house coffee just to see the reaction.