The Unwashed Truth

I have a rule about natural-process Ethiopians: don’t open the GrainPro bag in a confined space. You will smell like a fruit stand for the rest of the day. I learned this the first time we unzipped this Kayon Mountain lot in the Lakewood roastery — two regulars walked in twenty minutes later and asked if I’d taken up candle-making. Strawberry. Raspberry. Something almost cranberry-like, tart and concentrated. The green coffee smelled like a smoothie. Not subtle. An olfactory shakedown.

This is the Guji you don’t know. If you’ve read our piece on washed Guji — all jasmine and blueberry and tea-like transparency — set those expectations aside. Natural-process Guji is a different animal. Same mountains, same heirloom genetics, same soil, but where washing strips the fruit away and leaves the bean to speak for itself, the natural process leaves the cherry intact. For three to six weeks, these beans sit inside their fruit on raised African drying beds, fermenting in slow motion under the Ethiopian sun. What emerges tastes less like coffee and more like someone rehydrated a bag of trail mix and poured hot water through it. I mean this as the highest possible compliment.

The natural process at Kayon Mountain is methodical in a way that separates good naturals from the ones that taste like a barn. Cherries are hand-sorted for ripeness before they ever touch a drying bed — damaged or underripe cherry gets pulled immediately. What remains is spread in a single layer on raised mesh beds. Workers rotate the cherries constantly. For three to six weeks, depending on the weather, the fruit desiccates around the bean, concentrating sugars and generating the flavor compounds that make natural Ethiopians legendary. The target moisture is 11.5%. Miss it and you’ve got mold. Hit it and you’ve got a fruit bomb.

“Natural-process Guji tastes less like coffee and more like someone rehydrated a bag of trail mix and poured hot water through it. I mean this as the highest possible compliment.”

In the cup, this coffee is not subtle. The first thing you notice — the first thing everyone notices — is dried strawberry. Not fresh. Dried. Concentrated. The kind that sticks to your teeth. Then raspberry, tart and jammy, followed by a cranberry acidity that brightens the entire cup. Lemon threads through the middle, clean and citric, and just when you think the coffee is done, thyme shows up — herbal, savory, grounding a sugar rush through sheer force of personality. The body is medium-creamy. The finish is chocolate and dried fruit that lingers longer than you expect.

I roast this to a light-medium — just enough development to round out the edges without torching the fruit. Natural Ethiopians are volatile: push too far into first crack and the berry notes flatten into generic sweetness; undershoot and you get grassy peanut. The window is narrow. Brew on pour-over for the full spectrum: Chemex for a crowd, V60 when it’s just you and the morning. Aeropress is also excellent — a two-minute steep yields a cup so fruit-forward it borders on breakfast.

Five bags. That’s what we’ve got of this lot. Kayon Mountain doesn’t produce commodity volumes, and Royal Coffee’s Oakland warehouse listed this as out of stock not long after we claimed our share. If you’re the kind of person who reads coffee descriptions and thinks “I wish this tasted more like dried strawberry than coffee,” this is your moment. If you prefer tea-like florals and restraint, the washed Guji is right over there. No hard feelings.

Roasted in Lakewood, Colorado by the team behind Village Roaster, a family roaster since 1979. We don’t chase fruit bombs because they’re trendy. We chase them because they’re delicious, and because tasting a coffee that makes you question whether you’re actually drinking coffee is one of the few pleasures that hasn’t dulled after fifteen years behind a roaster. Open the bag somewhere ventilated.