Coffee Description
Fruit and chocolate: what’s not to love?! Both are found in extreme amounts in this powerfully built coffee that features strawberry jam, panela, and cocoa with crème caramel and floral notes. Fantastic hot to cool and sporting syrupy, jammy mouthfeel, it’s the perfect coffee for cold days. Shines in all sorts of brew methods.
Roast Level from the Roaster
Refers to the roast level in comparison with other coffees from the roaster
Light
Variety
Process
Natural
Elevation
1750 masl
Region
Kaffa
About Family Hand Agro of Ethiopia
Just at the end of the Ethiopian sourcing season, a friend came to Catalyst Coffee Consulting (now Catalyst Trade) with a coffee sample. Here’s what they had to say about it: “We should taste it, he said, and because Atrie Weno knows what he's talking about, we did. It was amazing. Pear, cascara, mango, and allspice wafted to us in the cup. Who grew this coffee? We asked. Mesfin Kitesa, he responded, and we purchased it just like that.” In turn, Onyx Coffee Lab did exactly the same thing.
Mesfin is Sidama and in fact worked for years with the Sidama Union. He has two washing stations in the beautiful Dale district of Sidama, but this coffee comes from the farm which he had the chance to invest in near Bonga, Keffa. (Kaffa refers to the area, Keffa to the people group, and since Catalyst Trade identifies their coffees for their representation of the people rather than the area, they call this one "Keffa."
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.
