“I’ve tasted Sauvignon Blanc. So I don’t need to do that again?”

A fairly nonsenical thought, no? Because wine drinkers understand that while a Sauvignon blanc will always taste Sauvignon blanc-ish, each estate will have its own terroir, and each vintage will be the product of the prevailing weather conditions of that particular year. To take another step, each wine maker will also make different decisions about when to harvest and how to process their grapes.

Grapes harvested later will be riper and thus are more likely to yield sweeter passion fruit and peach-type aromas, whereas their earlier harvested relatives may result in a crisper, lemon and lime-styled profile.

So, having tasted a sauvignon blanc once, assuming that you know everything there is to know about the varietal seems a little short-sighted.

Not too controversial an assertion, I trust?

The purpose of this post is to persuade you that Yirgacheffe, as a coffee experience, is every bit as varied as the concept of “Sauvignon Blanc” and thus needs to be treated with the same level of engagement.

So what is the essence of a yirgacheffe?

While the whole point of this piece is to convince you that every yirgacheffe is different, I have to concede that there is such a thing as “yirg-ness.” The Yirga-meister has its own genre. Generally speaking, a yirgacheffe will be a citric, floral, light-bodied almost tea-like coffee. Depending on the level of ripeness of the coffee cherries, and the level of roast applied, flavours can range from tart lemon, with bergamot, jasmine, and occasionally black pepper aromas, through to stone fruits (oft peaches and dried apricots) and even sweeter red berry notes in those lots that hold a higher percentage of fully ripe cherries.

Best enjoyed as…

A yirgacheffe lover will more than likely be drinking it black, and while it can make an incredible single origin espresso (if roasted with skill), our feeling is that Yirgacheffe’s floral and citric notes are communicated best through the clarity delivered by a well executed paper-filtered drip method.

But what about the great unwashed?

Historically, yirgacheffes have been processed in the traditional wet-processed (or fully washed) method, but over the last decade some truly exceptional unwashed (dried-in-the-fruit) yirgacheffes have been taking the world by storm. These coffee cherries are picked and then laid out to dry with the fruit of the cherry still on the bean. The end result, if well-executed, is a sweeter fuller-bodied coffee with flavour notes leaning away from the citric zone and more towards the riper peach, plum and strawberry notes (talking in broad terms).

The risk of the natural processing method is that the fruit left to dry in the sun can become moldy or rotten, if they are not regularly turned and monitored. The best results are attained where producers are meticulous in their process. If coffee cherries are dried without care and monitoring, the end result can yield rotten, fermented, musty, and vinegar notes, with drastically reduced clarity in the cup.

Want to stop reading about it and taste some coffee instead? Pop into our roastery in Cape Town’s Woodstock district to experience our single origin lots first hand.