As the year ends, we're reflecting on some of the best coffees we tasted over the past 12 months. This list is totally subjective, completely biased, and entirely rooted in personal preference.
Here are a few highlights from the year:
Ethiopia Aricha, Washed
This coffee from the Aricha washing station, less than 5km from the famous town of Yirgacheffe, was a top choice on our list for the year. It's one of those unique coffees that showcases exactly what people celebrate about a region. It's a beautiful example of how amazing washed coffees from Ethiopia can be.
We carried this coffee for several months on our greens page and our Toll Roasting menu, and during almost every production cupping, someone from our sensory team would pause to say, "wow, this is a great coffee". It tasted sophisticated, like it should be served in a wine flute.
The tasting notes for Ethiopia Aricha read like walking through the candy aisle at CVS. Grape, strawberry, maple, raspberry, honey, Smarties, syrupy, grapefruit, ginger. All bright, high-noted, sweet confectionary flavors with incredible clarity and punchiness. This coffee was available in the late Winter and into the Spring, but it tasted like liquid summer.
Ethiopia Chelbessa, Natural
Another classic coffee from the Yirgacheffe region of Ethiopia, this naturally processed offering from Chelbesa was everything we love about fruity African coffees. We had this coffee in our inventory during the Spring and early Summer of 2024. It found a home on our menus as a single-origin coffee and also provided the sweet fruit notes we need in our Cold Brew Blend.
From a cupping in June, our tasting notes were chocolate, raisin, strawberry, Koolaid, and "neon blue". That last descriptor, included without an ounce of sarcasm, usually means a coffee is just electrically sweet, vibrant, and almost artificially flavored. It's the tasting note of a 7-11 Slurpee®. A hard candy that turns your mouth a stunning aquamarine color. It's radical.
Costa Rica SL-28, Anaerobic Honey
We couldn't get enough of this coffee in 2024. We wrote about it on this blog, shared it with audiences at Coffee Fest, roasted it with students in Roasting 101, and added it to our greens and toll menus. It was our go-to "special" coffee when Steve needed something to share with someone as a thank-you gift.
What made this coffee so unique? To begin, just look at the name. Costa Rica has been a popular origin for specialty coffee drinkers due to its ideal climate and experimental attitudes towards processing and coffee cultivars. The anaerobic honey processing method stands out as a "best of both worlds" option for roasters who love fruit flavors but seek extremely clean cups. And the highly prized varietal SL-28, more commonly seen in Kenya, is instantly recognizable as a high-quality subspecies descended from African coffee types.
Here's what Bryant had to say about this coffee:
"[this was a]coffee we brought in to use for Coffee Fest tradeshow and our greens menu offering. There was a very small amount of bags available for this lot. The coffee was like sweet cola, peach, Lambrusco wine, and pink lady apples."
Other notes, from a cupping in August, where this coffee was profiled a few different ways, offer a smorgasbord of flavor descriptors. Caramel, sweet cream, hibiscus, Arnold Palmer, honeybush tea, nougat, butterscotch, apple chips, cherries. A real delight.
El Salvador Finca San Nicolas Pacamara, Natural
If you're one of our green coffee customers, you only had one chance to taste this coffee. It was a blend component in 2024's version of Hibernate Holiday Blend. We had hoped to add it to our Toll Roasting menu as a super limited offering, but the Hibernate Blend sold out quickly and we didn't have any left over.
We brought in a sample of this coffee at the very end of August when we first started shopping for holiday coffees. About this sample, Bryant said "Holiday seasons mean wild and intensely sweet coffees. This El Salvador was exactly that. POG juice, fruit cake, blackberry, peach, strawberry. The whole cup was just a delicious fruit punch."
Further tastings in September, when we'd purchased and started profiling the green, showcased its complexity. Fragrance and aroma notes of walnut, angostura bitters, and golden raisin were met with sweet citrus, dried fruit, and the unmistakable nostalgic flavor of Cap'n Crunch Berry cereal. This was a coffee that was jam-packed with flavor and, like all great things, only lasted for a short while.
Burundi Kayanza Masha Washing Station, Washed
Burundi is often overlooked as an origin for specialty coffee. Its neighbors Rwanda, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo get a little more attention when it comes to well-known African coffee-producing countries. But we always love tasting coffees from Burundi and enjoy their savory elements along with classic Eastern African characteristics of acidity and florality.
Bryant described this coffee as "full-bodied and chewy with notes of rooibos tea, cabernet, and marmalade". Unlike many other coffees on this list, it was a reserved and decidedly not fruit-forward offering. The coffee was dense and had a pleasant, earthy sweetness.
We tasted a sample of Kayanza in June and planned to bring it in as a replacement for another killer coffee from Rwanda (our "Coffee of the Summer") but by the time the Rwanda was gone, other offerings like the Colombia Pink Bourbon and Costa Rica SL-28 took the spot on our menu that's reserved for unique and interesting coffees.
Flores Manggarai Tuang, Washed
Maybe one of our most exciting offerings of the year was a coffee from a region we'd never tasted before. As explained in our cupping recap from March, Flores is a small island in Indonesia. Though the island is small, the flavors in the coffee pack a huge punch. Here are our observations from the March blog post:
"The coffee delighted us. It was complex and clean with a pleasant minerality that reminded us of a crisp white wine. It offered a floral fragrance with balanced acidity and a touch of sweet earthiness like a wet riverbed. Our cupping notes read like a description of a blend of coffees from Kenya, Ethiopia, and Java. Cherry tomato, bergamot, orange peel, limeade, wine, raisin."
We sold the last bag of this coffee last month and we will probably not get our hands on it again. If you were one of the handful of roasters (16 or so of you, by a rough count) to have tasted this coffee: congratulations, you were one of the lucky ones.
