Is Luckin Yirgacheffe Flavor Delicious? Introduction to Yirgacheffe's Taste Characteristics and Coffee Bean Rankings

Those who often drink coffee at Luckin Coffee may have noticed that in 2021, Luckin launched the SOE Yirgacheffe "Little Black Cup" limited series, which uses single-origin coffee beans to make espresso coffee, attracting many friends to come and taste it. In this article, FrontStreet Coffee will take you to understand what Yirgacheffe coffee is.

Yirgacheffe Originates from the Homeland of Coffee - Ethiopia

In Africa, many countries grow coffee. As the origin of world coffee, Ethiopia has a rich coffee culture, long history, and numerous varieties, like a huge coffee gene bank. Ethiopia's vast high-altitude regions, abundant rainfall, and fertile soil provide excellent natural conditions for coffee cultivation. Sidamo (SIDAMA), Yirgacheffe (YIRGACHEFFE), Guji (GUJI), and Harar (HARRAR) are all well-known producing areas we are familiar with.

The name Yirgacheffe comes from the town of "YIRGACHEFFE." The town is situated at an ultra-high altitude of 1700-2100 meters, with foggy days and spring-like seasons throughout the year. Coffee farmers plant coffee trees together with other crops in their backyards or farmland in front of their homes. Strictly speaking, Yirgacheffe is a sub-producing area within Ethiopia's Sidamo province, located to the northwest of Sidamo. Later, because the coffee produced here had a unique flavor and became famous worldwide, it separated from Sidamo and formed its own school.

With the rise of the third wave of coffee movement, consumers are willing to pay higher prices for coffee with specific regional flavors. For example, FrontStreet Coffee's Sidamo coffee has sweetness and floral notes, FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe coffee has medium body with sweetness and sweet aroma, and Harar coffee has exotic aromas with high-intensity berry notes. To protect its reputation, the Ethiopian government decided in 2004 to register the country's three famous coffee-producing areas as commercial trademarks, including Yirgacheffe Yirgacheffe®. What we call Yirgacheffe today mostly refers to a trademark of coffee flavor.

How Did Yirgacheffe Flavor Become Popular Worldwide?

The so-called Yirgacheffe flavor features elegant citrus, lemon, berries, and rich floral notes, with a clear tea-like sensation that makes it unforgettable once tasted. To express such refined flavors and mouthfeel, excellent growing environment, variety, processing method, as well as roasting and brewing are all indispensable.

Ethiopia, located on the African continent, has underdeveloped water resources, so traditionally, ancient natural drying methods have been used to process green beans, meaning direct drying in sunlight. Due to the crude methods, coffee quality was generally low. It wasn't until 1972 that Ethiopia introduced Central and South American wet processing technology and equipment to improve coffee bean quality. Unlike other producing areas, Yirgacheffe is a wetland, more suitable for wet processing. This move also amplified the citrus and lemon aroma of FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe coffee beans, making the taste fresher and brighter.

Wet processing steps: After picking coffee cherries, they are placed in water, using the buoyancy of water to select out insufficiently ripe fruits. Then a pulping machine removes the pulp and skin from the berries. They are left to rest in fermentation tanks for 18-36 hours until the mucilage layer decomposes. After fermentation, the parchment beans are washed in channels. Through specially designed channels combined with water flow, low-density and poor-quality beans are removed. Finally, the coffee beans are drained of moisture and spread on African-style raised beds to dry. Because bad beans are eliminated at multiple stages, greatly reducing the defect rate, the coffee shows higher cleanliness, and its own aroma becomes clearer and more transparent.

In the past, most of the coffee we drank had a predominantly bitter taste. The reason coffee is strong and bitter is mainly because roasters roast the coffee beans deeply, with the main flavor direction being nuts and dark chocolate. With the emergence of specialty coffee concepts, to preserve more acidity, roasters only lightly roast FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe coffee to an appropriate light degree. Lightly roasted FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe shows pleasant fruit acidity and white floral notes, which can be said to have opened the "new era of fruit-acid coffee." Preferring sweetness and fearing bitterness happens to be the public's taste preference, which is also why Ethiopia's Yirgacheffe is so popular around the world.

In recent years, various high-quality single-origin coffee beans have gradually been added to the regular menus of stores. For example, FrontStreet Coffee's bean list has a large blackboard, where each type of coffee bean written shows its unique flavor characteristics. Besides pour-over, baristas began to study applying uniquely flavored single-origin coffee beans to espresso extraction, so SOE也逐渐流行起来起来。On January 5, 2021, Luckin Coffee signed an agreement to purchase a total of 1000-2000 tons of specialty coffee beans annually from 2021 to 2023 in Ethiopia's Yirgacheffe producing area, and launched the SOE Little Black Cup in multiple cities. The coffee beans used in the "Little Black Cup" come from Ethiopia's Yirgacheffe, showing that single-origin coffees with outstanding flavors are gradually becoming a popular trend pursued by everyone.

What is the Flavor of FrontStreet Coffee's Self-Roasted Yirgacheffe?

As a fan of fruit and floral flavored coffee, FrontStreet Coffee has several types of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee beans on its bean list, among which the most representative are FrontStreet Coffee's washed Gedeb cooperative, FrontStreet Coffee's natural Red Cherry, and the representative of Ethiopian coffee, FrontStreet Coffee's washed Yirgacheffe daily bean.

Among customers who come to FrontStreet Coffee to drink coffee, if they hope to drink washed fruity coffee, FrontStreet Coffee's baristas will prioritize recommending FrontStreet Coffee's Gedeb cooperative from the bean rack; if they want full and rounded fruit sweetness, FrontStreet Coffee thinks FrontStreet Coffee's natural Red Cherry is more suitable.

FrontStreet Coffee's Gedeb cooperative has 300 cooperating small farmers and is famous for growing the highest quality coffee in Ethiopia. The processing method also follows the most traditional washed method and is known as "the last pure land of Yirgacheffe." FrontStreet Coffee's natural Red Cherry coffee beans are made from 100% mature coffee fruits dried naturally, preserving the complete coffee fruit. More sugar substances from the pulp and mucilage penetrate into it, so the flavor has richer sweetness with a fermented sensation.

FrontStreet Coffee believes that FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe is mainly characterized by fruit acidity and is more suitable for medium-light roasting to preserve more aromatic acidity in FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe coffee beans.

Cupping Flavor:

FrontStreet Coffee's washed Gedeb cooperative coffee's dry aroma emits fresh passion fruit, citrus, and berry acidic aromas. The wet aroma is citrus and berries. On entry, there's citrus acidity, berry sweetness, almond, tea-like sensation, with a honey-like sweetness in the aftertaste. Low body, bright acidity, clean and refreshing.

FrontStreet Coffee's natural Red Cherry coffee's dry aroma shows full berry sweet and sour. When sipped at different temperatures, it has soft berry sweet and sour, mature fruit fermented sensation, obvious honey sweetness with black tea aftertaste, and smooth mouthfeel.

Additionally, FrontStreet Coffee's launched Yirgacheffe daily bean uses washed processing and medium-light roasting, with classic Yirgacheffe flavor notes, suitable for various brewing methods such as pour-over, cold brew, French press, etc. FrontStreet Coffee's daily bean series allows friends new to the coffee circle to taste the basic flavors of different producing areas at affordable prices. Small packaging designs also avoid waste from unfinished coffee, making it suitable for coffee beginners. If you want to taste the classic aroma of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, FrontStreet Coffee thinks black coffee extracted by pour-over is most suitable.

FrontStreet Coffee's Brewing Suggestions

After roasting, coffee beans have a 4-7 day degassing period before entering their optimal flavor window. As storage time extends, the coffee's aroma will accelerate evaporation, and flavor and mouthfeel will greatly diminish. FrontStreet Coffee ensures that everyone drinks coffee at its best by only shipping beans roasted within 5 days. Fresh coffee beans are more conducive to extracting the excellent flavors of FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe.

FrontStreet Coffee · Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Brewing Parameters:

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

First, pour 30g of water for a 30-second bloom, then pour 95g more (scale shows around 125g), finishing in about 1 minute. When the water level drops to 2/3 of the coffee bed, pour the remaining 100g (scale shows around 225g), finishing in about 1 minute 35 seconds. Complete drip filtration at 2'10", remove the filter, and finish extraction.

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Important Notice :

前街咖啡 FrontStreet Coffee has moved to new addredd:

FrontStreet Coffee Address: 315,Donghua East Road,GuangZhou

Tel:020 38364473