What Variety is the Kachira Coffee Bean? Pour-Over Kachira Coffee Brewing Methods, Flavor Profile, and Taste Description

The Rising Popularity of Flower Champion Coffee

Luckin Coffee is a well-known domestic coffee brand in China. Recently, Luckin Coffee announced shocking news to the coffee community – they claimed that 90 tons of their purchased Flower Champion coffee beans were nearly consumed in just 10 days, with many stores even running out of stock. This news immediately propelled Flower Champion coffee beans into the spotlight.

So why has Flower Champion coffee become so popular? Because Luckin's Flower Champion SOE has been incredibly popular, with many people seeking it out specifically and discovering it tastes better than any coffee they've had before, featuring a unique flavor profile. FrontStreet Coffee would like to share some knowledge here – the unique flavor you're experiencing actually has a technical term called "coffee flavor." From its literal meaning, Flower Champion appears to be a coffee bean "overflowing with floral aromas." However, this is not actually the case. FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion doesn't have strong floral aromas; instead, its fruit aromas are more prominent, such as passion fruit, strawberry, mango, jackfruit, citrus, and others. The fruit aromas mentioned here are common flavor descriptors in coffee beans, typically found on the right side of the SCAA Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel.

Understanding Flower Champion's Unique Characteristics

At this point, many people may wonder why Flower Champion has fruit aromas. Are food additives added to these coffee beans? FrontStreet Coffee can definitively tell everyone: Of course not! This is the natural flavor of the coffee beans themselves. FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion beans are actually coffee beans produced in the Hambella sub-region of Ethiopia's Sidamo region. Generally, coffee names are based on their producing areas and origins. Whether translated into English or Ethiopia's Amharic language, Hambella doesn't mean "Flower Champion" – the leader among flowers. There's actually a story behind this.

In the coffee world, there's a coffee bean with exceptional reputation and outstanding quality that frequently appears in world-class coffee competitions – the Geisha coffee bean. This star variety shot to fame at the 2004 Panama BOP competition. Its English name is "Geisha." When Taiwan introduced this bean, they translated it as "藝妓" (Geisha) because Geisha is pronounced the same as "芸者" (geisha) in Japanese, and Taiwan's coffee culture trend was learning from Japan. When this bean was introduced to mainland China, it was named "瑰夏" (Guìxià). The naming of Flower Champion has an important relationship with the Geisha coffee bean.

The Origin Story of Flower Champion

At the 2017 TOH (Taste Of Harvest) green bean competition, a green bean from the Sidamo Hambella region stood out with its rich strawberry and cream aromas, winning the championship in Ethiopia's TOH natural processing category with a high score of 88.21. In the same year, barista Li Jianfei used this batch of coffee beans to participate in the World Brewers Cup, defeating many competitors' Geisha coffees and winning the China regional championship. The Beijing green bean importer who introduced this Ethiopian coffee bean was very excited – this Ethiopian Sidamo Hambella coffee bean actually defeated the perennial champion Geisha, wasn't it the leader among flowers? So they named it "Flower Champion." Thus, this Hambella coffee bean gradually gained popularity among domestic coffee enthusiasts under the name Flower Champion.

Terroir and Growing Region

After understanding the origin of Flower Champion coffee's name and its rise to fame, you're probably curious about this legendary bean. Of course, your greatest curiosity is likely about its flavor profile. We all know that coffee is ultimately the fruit/seed of a shrub. Discovered by humans and经过thousands of years of domestication and cultivation, it has become an agricultural product like rice and soybeans. Its consumption method involves roasting, grinding, and then brewing to drink, having become a beverage that provides mental stimulation and refreshment for humanity. Agricultural products are deeply influenced by factors such as variety, climate, and soil conditions. FrontStreet Coffee has researched and compiled the terroir information for this region as follows:

FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion coffee is produced in Ethiopia's GUJI region, which is Ethiopia's largest coffee-producing region. FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion comes from one of its sub-regions, Hambella. As mentioned earlier, coffee flavor is influenced by multiple factors, and even within the same producing region, different flavors can emerge. Therefore, Sidamo's coffee flavors are very diverse, as different soil compositions, regional microclimates, and countless native coffee varieties create significant differences and characteristics in the coffee produced by each town area.

The Sidamo region is located in southern Ethiopia, where agriculture dominates, and coffee-growing areas are situated around the East African Rift Valley. Hambella is administered by Ethiopia's southernmost administrative state, Oromiyaa, bordered to the west by the Kochore sub-region of the Yirgacheffe region across mountains, neighboring Shakiso to the east, connecting to Uraga to the south, and bordering Kercha to the north. Shakiso, Uraga, and Kercha are all sub-regions of the Guji region.

According to statistics, there are about 20 processing plants in Hambella, distributed across different villages and estates in the sub-region, varying in scale. DW Coffee Export, to which Flower Champion belongs, has a core producing area called Dimtu in Hambella, with an annual coffee production of about 1,100 tons. Within the Dimtu area, there are four estate processing plants: Buku Abel, Buku Saysay, Haro Soresa, and Tirtiro Goye. Only the natural-processed coffee from Buku Abel production and processing is "Flower Champion," which is why we always see Flower Champion appearing alongside Buku Abel.

Varieties and Processing Methods

The variety of FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion coffee beans is native varieties – meaning the coffee trees have been rooted in Hambella for a long time, making it difficult to distinguish between varieties. Due to long-term growth in the same soil and water conditions, the coffee flavors have converged toward a regional flavor profile, thus collectively called native varieties. Local people also name some varieties with significant differences based on the characteristics of coffee trees and coffee cherries. For example, the Small Bean Flower Champion variety is "dega," referring to a type of tree that is short, has small leaves, is dense, and produces small coffee beans. The X.0 series is less particular – in Flower Champion coffee beans, we can still find coffee beans of varying sizes.

In addition to terroir conditions, coffee as a unique agricultural product is also deeply influenced by factors such as field management and post-harvest processing. In a narrow sense, Flower Champion coffee beans specifically refer to natural-processed coffee beans from the Hambella Buku Abel processing plant. Of course, influenced by diverse market demands, water-processed Flower Champion coffee beans later became available, but we won't discuss that here.

Natural Processing Details

During the annual coffee harvest and processing season (December-January), the mountains are covered with red coffee cherries. Farmers are required to harvest red cherries with sugar content above 30 before beginning coffee cherry harvesting and natural processing. For the first two days of natural processing, it's necessary to maintain the humidity of the red cherries to allow their fructose to fully begin fermentation. Meanwhile, the high-altitude geographical location allows the processing plant's nighttime temperature to drop to around 12 degrees Celsius, preventing over-fermentation odors due to high temperatures. When temperatures are higher at noon, farmers will promptly provide shade to prevent sun damage to the red cherries. At night, to prevent sudden rainfall, thick plastic sheets are used for wrapping. This allows the red cherries to ferment and dehydrate at relatively low temperatures.

After 18 days of natural processing, when the moisture content of the green coffee beans drops to around 13%, the natural processing is stopped. The beans are packed into jute bags and placed in warehouses under natural conditions of 12-22 degrees Celsius and 45-55% humidity for about 50 days of green bean resting and further dehydration. When the green bean moisture content reaches around 11%, they are transported to the processing plant for hulling, screening, and sale. Coffee beans processed through Buku Abel's refined natural processing have a unique strawberry cream flavor.

Evolution and Development of Flower Champion

After Flower Champion coffee beans revealed their excellence in 2017, domestic coffee enthusiasts have imported them annually, and FrontStreet Coffee is no exception. After 2017, Flower Champion coffee beans used the X.0 series to distinguish between harvest seasons. For example, Flower Champion 2.0 was launched in 2018, Flower Champion 3.0 and 3.1 in 2019, and so on. Friends familiar with FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion may also notice that starting from 2020, this coffee bean from Hambella was divided into two types: FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion 4.0 and FrontStreet Coffee's Small Bean Flower Champion (to avoid confusion with Arabica small bean varieties, the words "Small Bean" were later removed from Small Bean Flower Champion. You can order and compare the differences between FrontStreet Coffee's X.0 and FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion coffee beans in FrontStreet Coffee stores or on Taobao – the latter is significantly smaller in shape than the former, and the flavors are also different).

As mentioned earlier, Flower Champion coffee beans initially gained popularity in 2017 for their rich strawberry cream flavor. However, FrontStreet Coffee's baristas tasted flavors similar to the 2017 Flower Champion in the 2018 and 2019 vintages, but the body and aftertaste were not as good as the 2017 Flower Champion. Of course, coffee as an agricultural product has slight flavor variations each year due to changes in regional soil, climate, and precipitation, as well as processing methods. FrontStreet Coffee previously wrote an article introducing the taste profile of FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion. However, FrontStreet Coffee also found that many coffee lovers who enjoyed the 2017 Flower Champion flavor were confused by these changes. Where exactly did the problem lie?

FrontStreet Coffee reviewed samples of FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion coffee beans and observed new harvest season green beans. By comparing different batches of Flower Champion, it became more apparent in the 2018 and 2019 vintages – sometimes among ten jute bags, a few bags of similar small beans would appear. We then realized that the main source of the 2017 Flower Champion's aroma was some particularly small bean varieties within the Flower Champion coffee beans. Therefore, in 2019, FrontStreet Coffee fed this information back to the green bean supplier, and afterward, the Small Bean Flower Champion was separated out each year and became its own category.

This year (2024), Flower Champion still maintains high popularity and welcomes its 8th version – FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion 8.0. FrontStreet Coffee extracted it through cupping, pour-over, cold brew, ice drip, SOE, and other methods, discovering that its tropical fruit notes are particularly prominent with high flavor complexity, making it a very worthwhile coffee to taste.

Brewing Recommendations

FrontStreet Coffee generally recommends using a Hario V60 dripper for pour-over brewing of light roast beans, using 15 grams of coffee powder with a 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio, water temperature of 90-93 degrees Celsius, and medium-fine grind (judged by an 80% pass rate through a Chinese #20 standard sieve). (Brewing parameters can be scanned from the QR code on the coffee bean packaging.)

Next, use a three-stage extraction method for brewing. First, use twice the amount of water as coffee powder for blooming – that is, 30 grams of water for 30 seconds of blooming. Then use a small water stream to pour in circles to 125 grams for segmentation. When the water level drops to 1/3, continue pouring to 225 grams and stop. (Timing starts from blooming) The extraction time is 2'00".

After extraction, gently shake, then divide into cups or pour into your favorite cup for tasting. FrontStreet Coffee recommends everyone first smell to experience the front-end aromatic compounds of FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion coffee beans, then slurp to fully experience its flavors. Some friends might find the slurping sound inelegant, but once mastered, you can experience the "blooming" sensation in the mouth that coffee experts describe.

FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion has distinct melon and fruit aromas when smelled, with soft fruit acidity upon entry, smooth mouthfeel, and flavors of passion fruit, jackfruit, strawberry, and berry. FrontStreet Coffee's Flower Champion 5.0 features prominent citrus and berry flavors with slight tropical fruit notes and an obvious juice-like mouthfeel. Which one would you prefer?

Connect and Explore More

For professional coffee knowledge exchange and more coffee bean information, please follow Coffee Workshop (WeChat official account: cafe_style)

For more specialty coffee beans, please add the private WeChat of FrontStreet Coffee, WeChat ID: qjcoffeex

Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473