Arabica Coffee Bean Recommendations - Introduction to Yirgacheffe Red Cherry Coffee Characteristics

FrontStreet Coffee - Yirgacheffe Red Cherry, an Arabica Story

Operation Cherry Red is a coffee quality improvement program led by Trabocca, a Dutch company, with half of its funding sponsored by the Dutch government. Since 2005 it has worked with many small coffee cooperatives across Ethiopia, encouraging and helping producers raise quality through washed, semi-washed, natural, and other experimental processing methods. Before each harvest, Trabocca invites selected smallholder organizations to produce a micro-batch of roughly 1,500 to 3,000 kg, hand-picking 100% ripe red cherries in several careful passes, which is where the Red Cherry Program gets its name.

Trabocca supplies money, equipment, and technical support, and commits to buying the coffee at premium prices as long as the cup meets its high standards. The program is therefore more than a fair-trade commercial arrangement; it is also a quality-driven production model and, in effect, a structural reform that benefits farmers and drinkers alike. Yirgacheffe is really a collection of surrounding coffee communities and cooperatives, most of them working with the washed process, though a small amount of specialty coffee is deliberately processed as natural to intensify the region's charming fruity aromatics and richness.

In 2008, after the highest-quality natural beans from Mist Valley were discovered by the United States, they became renowned worldwide. Grown as a craft-grade micro-lot, they made up for the aroma that washed Yirgacheffe can lack, and the result astonished the coffee world. The lot also earned Red Cherry Program certification. Ethiopian coffee is graded G1 and G2 for washed beans, with G1 the highest washed grade, and G3 and G4 for natural beans, with G3 the highest natural grade.

Yirgacheffe Natural Red Cherry

Processing Station: Aletland

Altitude: 1800-2300m

Variety: Local native varieties

Processing Method: Natural processing

Flavor: Berries, lemon, strawberry, fermented wine aroma

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

If the Red Cherry story has caught your interest, the FrontStreet Natural Red Cherry is the bean to try. It is a whole-cherry natural from Yirgacheffe: only fully ripe, unblemished fruit is picked, sorted once more at the station, then spread on raised beds to dry. For the first few days the cherries are turned every two to three hours so they never over-ferment, and after three to five weeks in the sun the dried pulp is scraped off by machine before the beans go into storage. Because the fruit dries on the seed, you get a classic Yirgacheffe cup lifted by tropical, sun-dried fruit: citrus-like acidity, a juicy berry mid-palate, honey sweetness, and a creamy, smooth finish.

It brews beautifully as a pour-over. FrontStreet suggests a V60, 15 g of coffee, a 1:15 ratio, and 90-91°C water, ground to roughly caster-sugar size (about 80% passing a No. 20 sieve). Bloom with 30 g of water for 30 seconds, pour to about 125 g, then top up to roughly 225 g once the bed has drained, finishing the pour around 1:35 and letting the drawdown complete at 2:00-2:10.