Losing my trust in naturals...

And why, friends?  Variance.  Particularly, whatever the heck kind of defects are afflicting this Ethiopian Guji we've got in.

(Meant to post this a while ago actually; we're pretty much done with this Guji now.)

See all those lighter-colored beans?  That's what I'm worried about.

Now, with anything that's not a micro-lot, particularly with Ethiopian heirloom varietals (heirloom is code for "it's been growing here for a while and it's tasty but we don't really know what it is", I think), I'm not surprised to see a lot of variance.  Different sizes and shapes of beans, different densities affecting the roasted color, etc.  And I'm not freaked out about one or two defects: we're buying good coffee, but not the super high-end micro-lot stuff.  Standing over the cooling drum and picking out a few weirdos isn't the end of the world.

But this Guji was bothering me: too many light-colored beans.  So, I spread it out and sorted it one day after all the production was done.

Hand-sorting beans is oddly soothing if you're a little OCD and given to making up little songs about what you're doing.  And if you feel like you don't get to use the word "winnow" enough.

And here's what I wound up with.  Now there were a big range of beans I was pulling out-- elephant ears, popcorns, a few faced or charred beans, fragments-- but primarily I was paying attention to color, pulling out these light gold or straw colors.  Some of them are quakers maybe?

The spooky thing about this coffee is: there's so much variance, that the more you pay attention, the more it looks like you should pull more out.  It's freaking fractal.  You pull out all the super-obviously light beans, and then your brain resets its parameters, and then the pile looks like it still has a ton of light beans.  So then you pull those out, your brain resets another shade, and on you go.  Eventually, I would probably wind up with only like 10% of the original pile.

And it would taste delicious.

And speaking of taste: what to do with all these light beans? Well, I wanted to know what exactly they were doing to the cup, and to what extent.  So the next day we set up a cupping with the unsorted beans, just the sorted, and just the defects.

Results: the cups that had the defects removed were definitely better, with cleaner, sweeter, more defined tastes and much less bitterness.

The defects themselves were INTERESTING to cup.  We were actually worried about our health for a second.  Some of these are relatively minor defects, physical variances that caused them to take the roast differently.  But a lot of them are issues in ripeness and/or fermentation (not sure how to tell on this end), and I think those are where the weirdness comes from.

Nasty, weird, bizarre flavor.  I've never encountered it isolated before, I don't think, but it's extremely distinct.  Michael compared it to chewing on aspirin, which apparently I have never done.

And even weirder than the gross flavors: the berries & chocolate were still there, peeking out from under the nastiness.

This experiment, plus our quality concerns, means that I've been putting aside some time to hand-sort at least the worst outliers from this coffee, which gets really fun after 30lbs or so.

And the weirdest thing is: this is still one of my favorite coffees we've roasted all year.  Phenomenal espresso bean, so much so that we're using it as an SO espresso for a local cafe here, Sweetness_7, and I'm super happy with the shots they're pulling.

More so since I've started sorting.

All I can think is: how much better would this be if it were picked better, sorted better, and, maybe the biggest thing: wash-processed to prevent fermentation variance?  Wish I knew more about coffee at origin to talk about this, but comparing this coffee against good washed process beans we have in stocks, I can't get over the difference.

Anyway that's my rant!  I'm not trusting naturals much now, but maybe someone can change my mind...