It's been years since I read this Coffee thread. It came up recently, and I had fun reading it all over again.
The surgery I had in the summer of 2020 plus the pandemic temporarily stopped my coffee roasting. I had plenty of green coffee beans on hand when I had surgery (prostate cancer) in June 2020. I didn't feel like roasting for about 2 months or so afterwards. When I started again, I realized my supply of beans had gotten very old. If I hadn't stopped roasting, I might have just continued using those old semi-stale beans. But I had gotten lazy, and the local roasted stuff, available in Whole Foods, was acceptable. I usually get
Swing's High Mountain Blend. (Local to the area,
Swing's has pretty good choices.)
That was in the fall of 2020, not a good time to order green coffee, as the season for the year's fresh harvest was over. So, I waited for June/July 2021. Nothing was showing up. The shipping back log was putting a real crimp in deliveries of the new crop. Finally, in October, I was able to order some Guatemalan Finca Rosma (my personal favorite) as well as some
Kenyan Kirinyaga Peaberry and
Ethiopian Hambela Dabaye (dry process) that looked like it would be good. Because of all the shipping delays, I placed a big order, 10 lbs of the Guat, and 5 lbs each of the Kenyan and Ethiopian. Sure enough, the Guat Finca Rosma and the Ethiopian both sold out fast. There's a lot of pent up demand, even though those green coffee beans were probably in shipping container since last July or August.
So, I'm finally roasting again. It's wonderful
.
Since this thread began, the only thing new for me is discovering how good dry processed Ethiopian coffee can be. Much earlier, I had tried dry processed (as opposed to wet washed) coffee from Indonesia. I hated it and blamed the dry method of processing the newly harvested coffee berries into coffee beans for the dirt-like flavor. That's what Indonesian coffee tastes like to me – like someone put a spoon full of dry soil in my coffee. Dry processed Ethiopian is completely different, and much more to my liking.