Coffee Description
This raised-bed dried coffee launches with a fruity, clean fragrance and flavors of lemon, blackberry candy, and Earl Grey tea. Sweet and complex, it offers moderate acidity, silky mouthfeel, and lingering vanilla and cacao in the finish.
Roast Level from the Roaster
Refers to the roast level in comparison with other coffees from the roaster
Medium
Process
Washed
Elevation
1900 masl
Region
Kaffa
About 260 smallholder members of Ethiopia
In Kaffa, Ethiopia, 260 smallholders banded together to form the Michiti cooperative. Here farmers/pickers often augment their own coffee crops by going out into the surrounding forest to pick from wild coffee plants which have sprung up on their own. The coffee is high grown, meticulously picked, sorted, and processed.
Before forming the coop and building their own processing mill in 2010, the only option for smallholders was to sell their dry cherries at such low prices that growing coffee did not really pay for itself. Now, Michiti farmers are producing higher quality coffee than their pre-co-op days, resulting in better prices and better and more stable living conditions.
Kaffa, Ethiopia
Onyx Coffee Lab
Lest the myth perpetuate that specialty coffee does not come from Arkansas, Onyx Coffee Lab is blowing that particular urban legend out of the water while creating a few of their own. Husband-wife owners Jon and Andrea Allen have rapidly taken the coffee world by storm with their combination of art and science.
The magic starts with sourcing, with countless small sample batches from coffee importers and with direct visits to farms around the world. "I know direct trade means a lot of different things to different people, but for us if we don’t put money in the producers hands we won’t call it direct trade," says Jon. Once found, the coffees are carefully roasted in twenty-pound or smaller batches, then shared with the three Onyx cafés and over 150 wholesale customers in thirty states.
Clearly Onyx Coffee Lab knows what they're doing: this northwest Arkansas matrix of coffee know-how routinely cleans house at the U.S. Coffee Championships; Andrea Allen placed first in the 2020 Barista Championship, while Elika Liftee placed first in the 2020 Brewers Cup Championship, and they both went on to the 2021 World Coffee Championships to place in 2nd place for Barista and 3rd place for Brewers Cup. Onyx has been chosen by Architectural Digest as Arkansas' most beautiful coffee shop, garnered multiple Good Food Awards, and been described as the "Best bags of coffee you can buy online" in GQ.
