Coffee Brewing Guide: How to Enhance Your Coffee's Floral Aroma? How to Brew Floral Coffee? What is Geisha in Coffee?

In any field, things with floral aromas always seem special — not only because the fragrance of flowers can soothe the heart, but because flowers, as a distinct emotional carrier, can stir recognition. Coffee is no exception.

Coffee can carry floral aromas too, and that fragrance is a flavor most enthusiasts pursue. Like other things, though, floral aroma is rare in coffee and not every coffee has it. Many friends privately ask FrontStreet Coffee how to brew coffee with floral aromas. The prerequisite is that we must start with a bean that possesses floral characteristics. If we have a bean without floral aroma, no amount of brewing adjustment will put the fragrance of flowers in the cup.

Where Do Floral Aromas in Coffee Come From?

Whether a bean can carry floral aroma depends mainly on whether it contains terpenoid compounds. Terpenoids are an important source of floral character in coffee, and they are shaped primarily by genetics and growing environment. This means that only when the genes carry these substances, or when the growing environment helps form them — for example, higher growing altitudes that spur the beans to generate more flavor compounds — can coffee develop floral character. (The point of flavor formation in coffee is not to enhance the human sensory experience.)

The world-renowned Geisha (T2722 variety) is precisely a coffee variety rich in terpenoid compounds. As for growing regions, Boquete, Yirgacheffe and others are famous for producing coffee with floral aroma. This explains why FrontStreet Coffee often cites the saying, "When orange trees grow south of the Huai River, they bear sweet oranges; when they grow north, they bear bitter trifoliate oranges." If a bean with natural floral character is planted in a region that can nurture floral flavor, it is truly icing on the cake. Once floral compounds form, processing and roasting work to adjust the proportion of floral flavor in the profile. In processing, fermentation driven by microorganisms can change the substances within the bean. Roasting degree, meanwhile, governs the formation and dissipation of floral flavor. So the same bean, under different processing and different roasting, yields different levels of floral intensity in the cup.

How to Brew Coffee with Floral Aromas?

When we have a bean with floral character, the most important step is to extract those floral aromas with water. The flavor compounds behind floral aroma are molecules with large mass and small polarity. You may find it hard to follow FrontStreet Coffee's frequent talk of large and small molecules, so here is a simple analogy: granulated sugar and rock sugar. (We had intended to use rock sugar as the example — unfortunately, we do not stock it in our shop.)

Place both in water and their complete dissolution speeds are entirely different. Substituting large and small molecules into that picture makes it much easier to grasp (referring only to dissolution speed). Small-molecule substances are like granulated sugar, dissolving very quickly in the same environment (hot water); large-molecule substances are like rock sugar, with a very slow complete dissolution speed. So we can understand large-molecule substances as sugars that dissolve relatively slowly, and extracting them completely requires extending the contact time between water and grounds.

At the same time, note that floral aromas are harder to capture than other flavors. Without a foundation in tasting, perceiving them can be more challenging. This is also why some expensive beans we consider delicious taste ordinary to the average person, no different from chain-store coffee — without a tasting foundation, they cannot tell the two apart (no offense intended).

We can certainly sharpen our flavor perception through tasting practice, but in the moment of brewing, what we need to do is let our current selves perceive the floral character. The method is simple: increase the concentration. By raising the coffee's concentration, we can make the floral flavors more concentrated. Increasing concentration also concentrates the taste as a whole, however, which is not friendly to those who dislike strong flavors — a double-edged sword. If you prefer gentler flavors, simply brew at your original ratio. Without further ado, let us begin today's brewing guide.

Brewing Process

The beans used this time are Hacienda La Esmeralda's Green Label Geisha, grown in the Boquete region. It has very rich floral character and happens to be tomorrow's promotional item, making it perfect for today's brew. The extraction parameters are no different from usual, only with a slightly higher coffee-to-water ratio and a relatively longer extraction time. The parameters are as follows: Coffee amount: 16g, grind size: 10 on the EK43 scale, with 80% passing through a No. 20 sieve (fine-sugar grind), coffee-to-water ratio: 1:14, water temperature: 92°C, filter cone: V60.

First, we use 30ml of hot water for blooming, lasting 30 seconds.

After the bloom ends, the remaining water amount is 194ml. For the second pour, we use 100ml of hot water, poured in small streams with large circular motions.

When the coffee liquid has permeated to the bottom, we can begin the third pour. This pour is 50ml of water, using small streams and small circular motions to focus extraction on the center of the coffee bed.

As the coffee drains to the bottom, we pour the remaining 45ml of hot water in a fixed position. We do not stir during this pour, because we have already extended the extraction time; without excessive stirring, the flavor compounds in the coffee can still dissolve fully. Then we simply wait for the coffee liquid to finish dripping and end the extraction.

Total time: 2 minutes and 11 seconds. Give it a swirl to even out the coffee liquids of different concentrations in the server. At this point we can already detect delicate white floral aromas from the fragrance released while swirling. Then pour into a cup and enjoy.

Jasmine, citrus and green tea — these are the most direct flavor characteristics FrontStreet Coffee experiences when tasting this Geisha. As the coffee is fully swallowed, we then perceive the highly sweet aftertaste of honeydew melon and orange peel. Clean, with a long-lasting finish, and truly delightful.

- END -

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

For a first taste of Ethiopia and its floral character, FrontStreet Coffee suggests starting with the classic FrontStreet Washed Yirgacheffe. 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 many drinkers. Yirgacheffe is a small town in Ethiopia's Sidama zone in the south, at an altitude of about 1,700-2,100 meters, with coffee trees planted above 1,800 meters — one of the highest coffee regions in the world. Because the Yirgacheffe name became so famous, Ethiopia's commodity exchange separated it from the Sidama region in 2010, which is how the now-familiar Yirgacheffe coffee came to be.

Within the Yirgacheffe area lie many smaller zones and even individual villages, and several of them house experienced cooperatives whose mature craft lifts the flavor further. The most representative is the washed FrontStreet Gedingding Cooperative. It sits in the Worka area at Yirgacheffe's southeastern edge and was originally part of the Worka cooperative under the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers' Cooperative Union (YCFCU); as demand for traceability grew, it was uncovered by coffee hunters around the world as a "single origin." Its processing follows the most traditional washed method, and it is often called Yirgacheffe's last pure land. FrontStreet Gedingding Cooperative carries no traditional bitterness, bringing its own clean, bright citrus and lemon acidity with jasmine fragrance, the kind of cup that wins people over at first sip.

FrontStreet also offers a natural-process expression of the same region. FrontStreet Natural Red Cherry uses a full-red-cherry natural process: only fully ripe, sound cherries are picked, given a first sort at the mill, then laid directly on raised beds to dry, turned every 2-3 hours in the first few days to prevent uneven heating and over-fermentation. After three to five weeks of sun-drying, the outer fruit is scraped away by machine as weather and temperature allow, and the coffee is moved to storage. Because the cherry dries with its fruit still attached, the coffee keeps the typical Yirgacheffe character while gaining tropical fruit from the natural process — citrus acidity, berry juiciness, honey sweetness and a creamy smoothness.

To brew these coffees, FrontStreet recommends a V60, water at 90-91°C, 15g of coffee, a 1:15 ratio and a grind of EK43s setting 10 — fine-sugar size, with about 80% passing a No. 20 sieve. The pour runs 30g for a 30-second bloom, then 95g (to about 125g on the scale), finishing around 1 minute; when the water level drops to two-thirds of the bed, pour the remaining 100g (to about 225g on the scale), finishing around 1 minute 35 seconds. Dripping completes in 2 to 2 minutes 10 seconds; remove the dripper and the extraction is done.