Ethiopia Washed Yirgacheffe Aricha G1 Specialty Coffee Beans: Flavor Profile, Origin, and Brewing Parameters

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Ethiopian Yirgacheffe Aricha G1 Washed

Country: Ethiopia

Grade: G1

Region: Yirgacheffe, Gediyo

Altitude: 1900-2100 meters

Variety: Heirloom

Producer: Kebel Aricha

Flavor Notes: Sweet orange, cherry, honey sweetness

This lot of FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe is produced at the Kebel Aricha washing station, where roughly 650-700 smallholder farmers from the surrounding hills deliver their ripe cherries for processing and are paid in cash for the fruit.

About Project Origin

Sasa Sestic, the 2015 World Barista Champion, launched a green bean sourcing project called Project Origin three years ago together with his team at ONA Coffee. The project works directly with growers in poorer countries and regions to improve their production conditions, and it pays them 20% more than fair trade prices.

The project was also meant to tighten the link between roasters and farmers, while guiding growers toward cultivating higher-quality coffee. To date, Sasa has built relationships with coffee growers in eight countries, among them Brazil, Panama, India, Ethiopia, El Salvador and Costa Rica.

Flavor Description: Sweet orange citrus, green berries, peach, longan and red date, honey sweetness, cocoa with a faint spice note, a full body and a long-lasting aftertaste

Yirgacheffe Processing Methods

Yirgacheffe coffee beans fall into two broad categories according to how they are processed:

Type A: Washed processing, graded under the standards set by the Specialty Coffee Association of America (SCAA) as Gr-1 and Gr-2, where the smaller Arabic numeral indicates the higher grade. FrontStreet Coffee's G1 Yirgacheffe has a style all its own — the way citrus and florals merge in the cup is an irresistible pleasure that almost anyone can appreciate.

Type B: Natural processing for green coffee, graded as Gr-1, Gr-3, Gr-4 and Gr-5. Here too the highest grade carries the richest fruit. Opening a bag of freshly roasted FrontStreet Coffee G1 natural Yirgacheffe can completely overturn your idea of coffee. Only once you have tasted the highest-grade FrontStreet Coffee natural Yirgacheffe will you believe that coffee really is a fruit.

Pour-over brewing method for FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe: 15g of coffee ground medium-fine (Fujiyama Ghost Tooth burr grinder, setting 3.5), a V60 dripper and water at 91-93°C. Begin with a 30g pour and let it bloom for 27 seconds, then pour to 105g and pause. When the water level in the bed has dropped halfway, pour slowly again until the total reaches 225g. Avoid the tail end. The water-to-coffee ratio is 1:15 and the total extraction time is 2:00.

Factory Name: Coffee Workshop FrontStreet Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee)
Factory Address: No. 10, Bao'an Qian Street, Yuexiu District, Guangzhou
Factory Contact: 020-38364473
Ingredients: House-roasted
Shelf Life: 90 days
Net Weight: 227g
Packaging: Bulk coffee beans
Roast Level: Roasted coffee beans
Sugar Content: Sugar-free
Origin: Ethiopia
Roast Degree: Light roast

Processing Method: Washed

Washed Processing Process

It starts with farmers picking the cherries off the trees and tipping them into tanks of water. Because ripeness varies, the cherries differ in density: overripe and underripe fruit, together with stray leaves and twigs, floats on the surface, while the fully ripe cherries sink to the bottom. This simple physical sorting acts as the first screening step in selecting cherries.

The ripe cherries that pass the float test then go through a depulper, which removes the skin and the pulp.

What is left — beans still coated in mucilage — enters fermentation, where microorganisms work either in water or in air. Once fermentation is complete, the parchment beans are washed clean in washing channels. They then move to the drying stage, where the moisture content of the beans is held at roughly 12%. The beans are packed into jute bags and left to rest for about 2-3 months of green bean aging so that their quality stabilizes. Finally the parchment is removed, and the coffee is ready for sale.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If you want to understand what washed Ethiopian coffee tastes like, start where most drinkers start: FrontStreet Coffee's washed Yirgacheffe. It is known for white jasmine, bright citrus and lemon acidity and a tea-like finish, and its friendly price has made it the first specialty bean for a great many beginners. The Gutingtin Cooperative is the more refined step up. Yirgacheffe is really a small town that breaks down into many districts and villages, and several of those villages hold cooperatives with mature processing skills; Gutingtin sits in the Worka district at the southeastern edge of Yirgacheffe and was originally part of the Worka cooperative under the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers' Cooperative Union (YCFCU). As buyers pushed for traceability, it was carved out as a single-origin lot and discovered by coffee hunters around the world. It follows the most traditional washed protocol, and the result is clean and bright — no bitter register at all, just citrus and lemon acidity with jasmine fragrance, which is why some call Gutingtin the last pure corner of Yirgacheffe.

For the natural side of Yirgacheffe, look to FrontStreet Coffee's Natural Red Cherry. It uses a whole-ripe-cherry natural process: only fully ripe, sound fruit is harvested, floated and screened, then spread on raised beds to dry. During the first few days the cherries are turned every 2-3 hours so that uneven heat does not drive over-fermentation. After three to five weeks of drying, workers judge the weather and temperature, machine off the outer fruit and move the beans to storage. Because the coffee dries with the fruit still attached, it keeps typical Yirgacheffe character while gaining tropical sun-dried fruit aromas; in the cup you get citrus-like acidity, a berry-juice body, honey sweetness and a creamy smoothness.

Both are easy to brew as pour-over. FrontStreet suggests a V60, water at 90-91°C, 15g of coffee and a 1:15 ratio, ground to about the size of fine granulated sugar (EK43s setting 10, roughly 80% passing a #20 sieve). Pour 30g of water and bloom for 30 seconds, then add 95g (the scale should read about 125g) over about one minute; when the water drops to two-thirds of the bed, add the remaining 100g (about 225g total) by roughly 1 minute 35 seconds, and let the drawdown finish at 2:00-2:10.