MALAWI PHOKA HILLS

So, as you all know, Malawi is one our own orgins and we have been loving the coffee coming from there. The naturals are sweet and chocolatey with that hint of citrus. But we thought, why not try to do something a little different and try to get more from the cherries. Last season, when we processed the cherries, we noticed some were extra ripe and they looked a bit crimson red and even a bit purple. We kept those aside because was always assumed these are too ripe and could lead to some sour and medicinal notes, but they why not process then and try them to understand what happens.

Well our cupping experiment produced interesting results. Some beans were bad and medicinal, some were actually not bad and some tasted sweet but boozy. It felt like the acidity was there but the sweetness was also there. Out of the three, we were intrigued by the ones that tasted nice. Then we did a bit of scientific research and spoke some producers and friends in Colombia & Brazil, to understand what was the reason. So let’s explain it to you in the least complicated way.

Coffee cherries have a sugar content in them measured in degrees Brix (a scale used to measure the amount of dissolved sugar in a liquid through a refractometer). High-Brix natural processing means selecting cherries at a higher measured sugar concentration before putting them through the natural process. In this lot, those higher-Brix cherries gave us more sweetness, a heavier body and enough acidity to keep the cup lively. The major risk with this type of processing is that over-ripe cherries can result in defects, doing this process at a large scale is quite complex and most of all, the characteristics of this is coffee is not like standard natural prcoess coffee.

Long story-short, we thought this a cool experiment we should try becasue we do know that some people do look for mild acidity, high sweetness and heavy body. Some anaerobic coffees are great with high sweetness but also have some high acidty that some poeople that some might not appreciate, this is especially the case when it come to espressos. So with help from friend, we tried our first semi-experimental lot from Malawi. We look forward to hearing the feedback and decide whther to try this again or do some new experiment!