Coffee Description
Some coffees go beyond comfort or excitement and instead form a symphony. This is one of the most perfect coffees we have encountered. Extremely floral, sweet, and complex, it's loaded with notes of pineapple, honey and roses with such heights of flavor complexity that we honestly were shocked.
Roast Level from the Roaster
Refers to the roast level in comparison with other coffees from the roaster
Light
Variety
Process
Natural
Elevation
2100 masl
Region
Sidama
About Smallholder Farmers of Ethiopia
This is our third year working with Catalyst Trade as well as buying from the Abore site. Each harvest of coffee has been marked by a perfume-like fragrance that is immediately apparent upon grinding. Rarely do we find a coffee we are excited about at origin only to find this has arrived three months later even better than we originally thought.
Emily and Michael McIntyre of Catalyst Trade and their Ethiopian partner, Zele, are incredibly passionate and dedicated to these coffees. Aromatics combined with the sweetness of the coffees as well as the staggering amount of transparency they provide in regards to what it truly takes to import coffee makes this anaerobicly fermented coffee from one of our favorite releases of the year. It extracts easily for the coffee professional and first-timer alike. Enjoy, my friends!
Sidama, 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.
