How to Drink Yirgacheffe: How to Taste Yirgacheffe Pour-Over Coffee?

Yirgacheffe is a coffee bean with extremely high flavor recognition. Its fresh and elegant white floral notes and citrus fruit acidity make people remember the name of this coffee bean at first taste. In the eyes of countless coffee lovers, compared to the expensive Geisha coffee, Yirgacheffe often gives the impression of being both affordable and delicious, making it a popular choice for daily consumption beans. On FrontStreet Coffee's bean list blackboard, there are 4 types of Yirgacheffe alone, including traditional washed and natural processed varieties, showing how popular it has become.

Where does Yirgacheffe coffee come from?

Like countless premium coffees, Yirgacheffe also comes from Ethiopia, the "hometown" of coffee. However, it's not a coffee variety name nor does it belong to estate terminology; instead, it's named after a local town—Yirgacheffe town. In this town, coffee trees grow at high altitudes between 1700-2200 meters. The temperature here is lower, and the growth rate and maturation time of coffee cherries are slow, allowing enough time to accumulate more nutritional components and flavor substances. Therefore, the coffee beans produced have unique flavors and high quality, quickly becoming famous worldwide. Later, after the Ethiopian government officially patented the "Yirgacheffe" regional name, Yirgacheffe coffee became synonymous with Ethiopian specialty coffee.

As one of the representatives of global specialty coffee, Yirgacheffe possesses unique citrus and lemon fruit aromas, along with jasmine fragrance. Its fresh and bright floral-fruit notes, layered acidity, clean taste without impurities, and rich yet balanced mouthfeel are the captivating characteristics of Yirgacheffe. It's also honored as a representative of premium African coffee and enjoys high reputation among coffee connoisseurs worldwide.

How did Yirgacheffe flavor become popular worldwide?

The so-called Yirgacheffe flavor, as FrontStreet Coffee believes, features rich layers of citrus, lemon, and berry sweet-tart quality, accompanied by delicate white floral notes and clear tea-like sensations, making it unforgettable at first taste. To express such refined flavors and mouthfeel, coffee's excellent growing environment, variety, processing method, as well as roasting and brewing are all indispensable.

Located on the African continent, Ethiopia lacks developed water resources, so traditionally, ancient natural drying methods were used to process green beans—drying directly under sunlight. Due to the rough technique, coffee quality was generally low. It wasn't until 1972 that Ethiopia introduced Central and South American washing processing technology and equipment to improve coffee bean quality. Unlike other regions, Yirgacheffe is a wetland area, more suitable for washed processing. This initiative also amplified the citrus and lemon aromas inherent in Yirgacheffe coffee beans, making the taste fresher and brighter.

Washed processing steps: After harvesting coffee cherries, place them in water and use buoyancy to separate insufficiently ripe fruits. Then use a depulper to remove the fruit pulp. Let the beans rest in fermentation tanks for 18-36 hours until the mucilage layer decomposes. After fermentation, the parchment beans are scrubbed in channels. Through specially designed channels with water flow, low-density, poor-quality beans can be removed. Finally, the coffee beans are drained of moisture and spread out on African raised beds to dry. Because defective beans are eliminated in multiple stages, greatly reducing the defect rate, the coffee exhibits higher cleanliness and its own aroma becomes clearer and more transparent. FrontStreet Coffee's daily offerings from the Buna Dira Cooperative and Kochere are processed using this method.

In the past, most of the coffee we drank had predominantly bitter flavors. The main reason coffee was bitter and strong was that roasters roasted the beans darkly, with the main flavor direction being nuts and dark chocolate. With the emergence of specialty coffee concepts, to preserve more acidity, roasters only roast Yirgacheffe coffee to an appropriate light level. Light-roasted Yirgacheffe expresses pleasant fruit sweet-tart notes and white floral aromas, which can be said to have opened the "new era of fruity acidity coffee." Preferring sweetness and fearing bitterness happens to align with public taste, which is why Yirgacheffe is so popular worldwide.

Is there natural processed Yirgacheffe? Is it good?

Although washed coffee once became a trend, natural processing still occupies the main portion of Ethiopian coffee, and high-quality natural beans are not uncommon domestically. Unlike the past, today's natural processing invests more thought in manual selection and ensuring uniform drying details. The Red Cherry coffee beans on FrontStreet Coffee's bean list are selected from high-quality Yirgacheffe using traditional natural processing.

To improve the income of local Ethiopian farmers and coffee quality, Dutch trading company Trabocca BV launched the "Operation Cherry Red Project" in 2007, mainly targeting high-altitude regions like Ethiopian Yirgacheffe to improve washing, semi-washing, and natural processing techniques. Professional cuppers joined the project, setting different coffee harvest amounts for different microclimate zones during harvest seasons, requiring only 100% mature red coffee cherries to be harvested, with production approximately 1500-3000KG. The economic loan support, new hardware equipment, and production knowledge technology provided by Trabocca Company greatly improved the coffee bean quality in the Yirgacheffe region and even throughout Ethiopia, resulting in higher coffee prices and increased farmer income.

Freshly harvested red coffee fruits are manually screened to remove defective beans, overripe or insect-damaged ones, leaving only good beans. They are then sent to drying locations for processing. Of course, different regions use different drying racks—some might use waterproof tarps, high beds, etc., but the most common is African raised beds. Drying time generally requires 27-30 days until the coffee turns dark purple and moisture content drops to 11% to be considered complete. Natural processed Yirgacheffe has more intense flavors, richer layers, with fermented wine-like aromas and relatively higher sweetness.

Yirgacheffe Pour-Over Parameters Sharing

FrontStreet Coffee often receives brewing consultation messages from enthusiastic learners across the country. Today, FrontStreet Coffee will use natural processed Red Cherry coffee beans as the brewing subject and explain our extraction philosophy according to our shop standards—take notes everyone!

Since Yirgacheffe coffee beans grow at high altitudes and have harder texture, to extract more floral and fruit notes from the coffee, FrontStreet Coffee uses high-temperature water at 92°C to 93°C for extraction. For grinding degree, FrontStreet Coffee recommends medium-fine grind (Chinese standard 20-mesh sieve passage rate of 78%). Too coarse won't extract the body substances, making the brewed coffee seem thin. Too fine can easily lead to over-extraction at high water temperatures, causing bitterness in the brewed coffee.

During cupping, FrontStreet Coffee noticed that this bean exhibits different flavors at different temperatures, so we use three-stage extraction to allow different flavor compounds to better express themselves during the gradual temperature increase of the coffee bed. To highlight the refreshing and charming aroma of washed Yirgacheffe, FrontStreet Coffee uses V60 dripper for brewing. The spiral rib design of the dripper allows coffee grounds to better degas, maximizing the activation and dissolution of acidic aromatic compounds.

For brewing ratio, FrontStreet Coffee believes that 1:15 to 1:16 are both acceptable. If you want a richer mouthfeel, use 1:15. If you want to more clearly perceive the floral sweetness, you can use 1:16 to allow the flavors to spread out more.

Filter: V60
Water Temperature: 92-93°C
Dose: 15g
Ratio: 1:15
Grind: Fine sugar size (20-mesh sieve screening to 78%)

Three-stage pouring: Use twice the amount of coffee grounds in water to moisten the coffee bed, forming a dome and bloom for 30s. Then use a small water flow to pour in circles from inside to outside until 125g for the first stage. Wait until the coffee bed drops to half the height of the dripper, then continue with the same fine water flow to pour the third stage to 225g. Until all coffee liquid has filtered through, remove the dripper—time approximately 2 minutes. After the coffee from the dripper has flowed into the lower server, remove the dripper, then shake the coffee liquid in the server evenly, and you can start tasting Yirgacheffe's flavors from high temperature.

How to properly taste Yirgacheffe coffee flavors?

From this washed Yirgacheffe, FrontStreet Coffee senses very rich layers. First, after grinding, we detected the fresh aroma of honey, berries, and jasmine. Then, when FrontStreet Coffee poured hot water, it began to emit hints of apple aroma. The first sip of black coffee revealed rising yellow lemon and sugar tangerine-like acidity. As the temperature slightly decreased, the palate experienced green grapes, cream, and sugarcane aftertaste, with obvious sweet aftertaste and a clean, sweet mouthfeel.

For professional coffee knowledge exchange and more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat public account: cafe_style).
For more specialty coffee beans, please add FrontStreet Coffee's private WeChat: qjcoffeex

When mentioning how to drink Yirgacheffe, FrontStreet Coffee believes that if you're a newcomer to specialty coffee, you might want to try tasting Yirgacheffe in the form of pour-over black coffee first, as this allows you to better experience its rich floral aromas and explosive fruit acidity.

Important Notice :

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