Natural Ethiopian coffee

Qore! Qore! Qore!

Many of you have reached out with questions on how to best brew this coffee so here are our thoughts on it!

Qore—pronounced “koray”—is a natural process (sun-dried in the fruit) coffee from Ethiopia produced by Israel Degfa. First of all, if you have not tried a natural Ethiopian coffee yet, stop reading this blog and go buy some! These coffees are often what industry professionals will wax poetic over as their “a-ha!” moment coffees that changed their lives forever and sent them down the rabbit hole of craft coffee. I distinctly remember thinking some joker had poured blueberry syrup in my coffee when I wasn’t looking; it was that fruity! “This doesn’t even taste like coffee!” I thought, but nobody was pulling a fast one on me. 

Coffee beans are actually seeds that grow inside a tropical plant’s berries. When they are left inside the berry to dry like raisins over the course of a few weeks they absorb a ton of extra fruity flavor and sweetness which translates into your brewed cup. The effect is quite amazing to the first-time sipper and experienced taster alike! If you think about this process though, fresh fruit is just being left out at the mercy of the elements for a long time. There is potential for things to go wrong, and sometimes funky flavors can creep into the coffee seeds. However, the best natural coffees are carefully sorted and turned as they dry and can be clean and bright.

We love brewing it at a 1:14 ratio, 24 grams of ground coffee for 336 grams of water, just shy of a twelve ounce cup. We go a bit heavier than our usual 1:16 or 21 grams for a couple of reasons. First, Qore is lighter bodied than most coffees we’ve had lately, so the increase in ground coffee gives it a richer mouth feel. Also, we are grinding it a bit coarser than usual to aim for less extraction. I mean we are deliberately trying to dissolve fewer soluble flavors than normal. And that’s okay with this coffee, because all of that bright fruity goodness comes out easily at first, so we only risk leaving behind any off-tasting things that I mentioned before which might have made it into a bean or two. 

Try this recipe for yourself! When it’s really dialed in, it tastes like cherries, peaches and sweet black tea, and I was even getting tropical notes of pineapple and mango…mmmm!

If you’d like to know even more about how we found this coffee and where it comes from check out this video in our Candid Coffee series over on our YouTube page: link

Also in The Tattered Journal