Notes from Guji, and what natural process actually tastes like

People ask us why Ardent tastes the way it does. The honest answer is that we did not fully understand it ourselves until we went to Guji and watched the coffee being made.

Guji sits in the south of Ethiopia, high enough that the mornings are cold and the afternoons are sharp with sun. The farms here are small. Many are a single family with a few hundred trees on a slope you would not want to walk up twice in a day. The cherries are picked by hand, and only the ripe ones, which sounds obvious until you see how much fruit gets left on the branch for the next pass.

The drying beds do the work

Natural process means the cherry dries whole, fruit still on the seed, instead of being pulped and washed first. On the beds at Guji the cherries are turned by hand several times a day for two to three weeks. Too fast and the coffee tastes flat. Too slow, or piled too deep, and it ferments into something boozy and sharp that nobody wants.

What we had not appreciated, until we were turning cherries at six in the morning with cold hands, is how much attention this takes. The fruit sugars soak into the seed as it dries. That is where the peach and the jasmine come from. It is not an additive or a trick. It is patience, repeated for weeks, by people who have done it their whole lives.

What we changed

We used to roast Ardent a shade darker, worried that a light roast would read as sour to people used to supermarket coffee. Standing on those beds, tasting the cherries, we realised we were sanding off the exact thing that made the lot special.

So we pulled the roast back. Ardent now finishes lighter than anything else we make. The first week we shipped it, we held our breath. The notes we got back used the word “tea” more than once, which is exactly right.

If you have a bag of Ardent at home, brew it a little cooler than you think you should, around 92 degrees, and give it room. It rewards a slow morning.