Ethiopia Guji Tuku is a highly rated (93.2) specialty coffee bean well worth the $$. With less than 2% of all coffee in the world receiving this score or more, this is a rare bean indeed. Sweet Marias has a great post devoted to how a bean is rated using cupping. https://library.sweetmarias.com/understanding-our-coffee-reviews/
This bean comes from a mill in the Guji region owned by a man named Tuku (hence the name). The owner of the mill travels to farms in the region, purchases the cherries, to process and sell to exporter partners.
This Guji bean is processed using the oldest way of processing the bean, the dry (natural) process. Using raised beds, the workers spread the whole coffee cherries over the beds with full sun exposure. It takes a long time to dry the cherries down enough to meet the standards required. During the long drying periods, fermentation occurs in the cherry. This is, in large part, why this particular bean has a fruity flavor.
Photo by: Coffee Shrub https://www.coffeeshrub.com/
Guji Tuku is a highly dense bean, making it an interesting roast. The denser the bean, the higher the amount of available sugars, which means that lighter roasts will produce sweeter coffee. The darker your roast the more the sugars start to burn and your bean will produce acrid/bitter flavors. Also, the extra sugars stay hot longer even after you remove the heat and the bean continues to roast on its own for a longer period of time. Think about this in cooking terms. When you are making caramel, you have to really watch the sugar as it melts and remove the heat when the sugar turns the color of a bright penny. That sugar will continue to cook even after heat is removed and, if you go too far, you might as well throw out the whole batch.
Back to the bean 😁. To get the best, even roast we hit this bean with high heat at first to get the heat to transfer to the inside of the bean, knowing that it will cook at a rate of its own. Then we introduce air earlier than other less dense roasts (like a Brazilian or Sumatra) while dropping off the fire. This will cool the outside of the bean and draw heat from the hot sugars in the middle so that the residual roasting on the inside won’t result in an over roasted bean inside or out.
We recommend a City to a City+ (light) roast level to get the best quality of flavors for this bean. We hope you enjoy this incredibly rare, limited addition bean. Ethiopia Guji Tuku is truly a bean of royal quality that our label represents.