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, drawing many friends in to taste it. In this article, FrontStreet Coffee will take you through what Yirgacheffe coffee actually is.

Yirgacheffe Originates from the Homeland of Coffee - Ethiopia

Many countries in Africa grow coffee. As the origin of world coffee, Ethiopia has a rich coffee culture, a long history and a great number of 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 that we are familiar with.

The name Yirgacheffe comes from the town of "YIRGACHEFFE." The town sits at an ultra-high altitude of 1700-2100 meters, with foggy days and spring-like weather all year round, and farmers plant coffee trees alongside other crops in their backyards or on the 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 a school of its own.

With the rise of the third wave of coffee, consumers are willing to pay higher prices for coffee with a specific regional flavor. FrontStreet Coffee's Sidamo coffee, for example, has sweetness and floral notes; FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe coffee has a medium body with sweetness and a 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. 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 and berries with rich floral notes, plus a clear tea-like sensation that makes it unforgettable once tasted. To express such refined flavors and mouthfeel, an excellent growing environment, the right variety, the processing method, and roasting and brewing are all indispensable.

Ethiopia, on the African continent, has underdeveloped water resources, so traditionally the ancient natural drying method has been used to process green beans—in other words, drying them directly in the sun. Because the methods were crude, coffee quality was generally low. It was not 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, which makes it better suited to wet processing. That 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, the coffee cherries are placed in water, and the buoyancy of the water is used to select out insufficiently ripe fruit. A pulping machine then 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, the defect rate drops considerably, 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 that roasters roast the beans deeply, with the main flavor direction being nuts and dark chocolate. With the emergence of specialty coffee concepts, roasters keep FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe coffee at a light roast to preserve more acidity. Lightly roasted FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe shows pleasant fruit acidity and white floral notes, and 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. FrontStreet Coffee's bean list, for instance, has a large blackboard where each type of coffee bean written up shows its unique flavor. Besides pour-over, baristas began to study applying uniquely flavored single-origin coffee beans to espresso extraction, so SOE also gradually became popular. 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 trend that everyone pursues.

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 a washed fruity coffee, FrontStreet Coffee's baristas will first recommend 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. Its processing also follows the most traditional washed method, and it is known as "the last pure land of Yirgacheffe." FrontStreet Coffee's natural Red Cherry coffee is made from 100% mature coffee fruits dried naturally, preserving the whole coffee fruit. More sugar compounds from the pulp and mucilage move into the bean, so the flavor carries richer sweetness with a fermented sensation.

FrontStreet Coffee believes that FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe is mainly characterized by fruit acidity, and is better suited to a medium-light roast so that more of the aromatic acidity survives in the beans.

Cupping Flavor:

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

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

FrontStreet Coffee's Yirgacheffe daily bean is washed and medium-light roasted, with the classic Yirgacheffe flavor notes, and suits various brewing methods such as pour-over, cold brew and French press. The daily bean series lets friends new to the coffee circle taste the basic flavors of different producing areas at an affordable price, and the small packaging design also avoids the waste of coffee that never gets finished, making it suitable for coffee beginners. If you want to taste the classic aroma of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, FrontStreet Coffee thinks a black coffee extracted by pour-over is the most suitable choice.

FrontStreet Coffee's Brewing Suggestions

After roasting, coffee beans go through a 4-7 day degassing period before entering their optimal flavor window. As storage time extends, the coffee's aroma evaporates faster and the flavor and mouthfeel diminish greatly. FrontStreet Coffee ensures that everyone drinks coffee at its best by shipping only 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: 90-91°C
Dose: 15g
Coffee-to-Water Ratio: 1:15
Grind Size: Fine sugar size (20-mesh screen sieve to 80%)

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

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 account: qjcoffeex

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Yirgacheffe is the classic starting point for anyone who wants to understand what Ethiopian coffee tastes like, and FrontStreet's simplest introduction to it is the washed Yirgacheffe daily bean. It is known for white jasmine, bright citrus and lemon acidity and a tea-like body, and its friendly price has made it the first specialty coffee for a great many drinkers. If you want the purest expression of the region, FrontStreet's Gedingding cooperative coffee is the most representative washed Yirgacheffe in the lineup: the cooperative has mature processing experience and its coffee is prized for its particularly refined, clean flavor, so a medium-light roast draws out jasmine and bright citrus acidity along with green tea and honey notes. And if you would rather have fullness and rounded fruit sweetness than clarity, FrontStreet's natural Red Cherry is made entirely from fully ripe red cherries dried with the fruit still on, so the pulp and mucilage push more sugar into the bean and the cup shows a soft berry sweet-and-sour quality, a ripe-fruit fermented sensation and clear honey sweetness over a black tea aftertaste. All three suit pour-over, cold brew and French press, and can even be pulled as espresso.

To get the classic Yirgacheffe aroma, brew it as a black pour-over: use a V60 with 15g of coffee at a 1:15 ratio, water at 90-91°C and a grind about the texture of fine sugar (20-mesh screen, 80% pass). Pour 30g of water for a 30-second bloom, then add 95g so the scale reads around 125g at about the one-minute mark, and when the water drops to two-thirds of the bed pour the remaining 100g to reach roughly 225g by 1 minute 35 seconds; the drip should finish at 2'10", at which point you remove the dripper and the extraction is complete.