Description

Farm Notes

The dry process lot from Daurfusu has a rustic layer of cooked fruit in the smells, something like warm apple sauce with cinnamon, amidst bittering cocoa, and a pistachio/green nut note. Aromatically speaking, adding hot water to the grounds only enhances the aspects found in the dry fragrance. The cooked fruits really come out in this context, with some herbal accents shadowing the fruited sweetness, along with a winey scent of honey mead. The cup sweetness is pretty wild with fruit flavors, apple topping at the top of the list for me, a little winey, like fermented cider. The profile opens up to include notes of mango puree, earth toned date, Bartlett pear, and a little pear skin bittering is also in the finish. The acidity level is fairly quiet, which doesn’t always bode well for the wild and wooly type naturals like this one. But Daurfusu puts up high numbers in sweetness and body, which really helps to stabilize the fruity cup character. Full City+ roasting tames the fruits significantly, building out an incredibly bittersweet base flavor, with dark plum, and date notes, and body so thick you could stand a cupping spoon in it!

Cupping Notes

You may recognize this coffee name from previous years, and it’s from many of the same small holders in this region. The biggest difference with this year’s coffee is that the farmers are delivering whole coffee cherry to a central processing station instead of managing the wet processing individually at home. The cherry collection and new wet mill where the coffee is handled is run by the same Farmpro group who we’ve bought Timor Leste coffee from the last few years, and they only continue to refine their process. The Daurfusu wet mill is located in Dukurai village, Letefoho District. Initially comprised of 37 members in Dukurai, the operation has cast a wider net this year and is buying coffee from neighboring high altitude zones as well. Farmers in this area are growing a mix of cultivars, mostly Timor Hybrid and Typica, at altitudes of 1400 to 1600 meters above sea level. This is a dry process coffee, meaning the whole coffee cherry is laid to dry without any removal of the fruit. The dry times are quite long with all that wet, organic mass, usually upwards of 3-4 weeks time. The fermentation that occurs inside the cherry often leads to a fruity cup profile, bigger body, and muted acidity. The results can be wildly different than a wet processed batch from the same farm or station, and in this case, we have a correlate from Daurfusu to compare with! It’s a unique opportunity to taste just how profound an impact processing can have on the final cup profile.