Nano Challa has a [...] bright and well-structured cup flavor profile. The underlying sweetness in light to middle roasts is reminiscent of white honey, which is mildly fruited in flavor, and a note of ginger chew candies. Lighter roasts have a mild citrus note, along with jasmine flower, and Earl Grey tea accents. Darker fruit tones are built up at deeper roast levels, along with a Ricola-like dark herbal aspect. This years' Nano Challa has a dense mouthfeel, especially in middle to dark roasting, making for a nice choice for espresso blend accent coffee. Nano Challa cups OK at Full City+, but loses the intense sweetness and bouquet of fruit that is afforded at light to middle roasting.

This is not a coffee that you can bully with intense heat or one that will forgive you like a Kenya. Roasting Ethiopian coffees well is as much as a finesse game as there is in coffee roasting.

The quintessential cup qualities of the best Ethiopian coffees are the sweet floral notes, followed by the potent citrus notes. It's important to keep your eyes on the prize of the florals though, as many roasters get hung up on the lemongrass and citrus and end up roasting to that while burying the beautiful jasmine and honeysuckle notes. In some, the citrus and floral notes are perfectly married into bergamot.

The secret to bringing out the best of Ethiopian coffee is not just in roasting them lighter. The key really lies in the controlled velocity in 1st crack. The 1st crack in these coffees can start slow and then just keep trickling along without ever seeming to reach a defined conclusion. Allowing this to happen can result in some really muddled flavors in the cup or even just a lack of definition in the citrus notes and otherwise. While you don't want to dry out the coffee too quickly in the beginning stages, it's a good idea to make sure there's a little extra energy at least when you're going into first crack.

Giving the roast a boost right before getting into the crack and making sure that there's a nice rolling vigorous crack is what you're aiming for. Don't push right on through; once there's a nice rolling crack you'll want to pull back on that energy or adjust the air (depending on your roaster) in order to make sure you don't get too short of a crack. You're looking for somewhere in the neighborhood of a good minute and a half to 1:45, and you want a clear end point to the crack as well without too many straggler pops.

ira wrote:How did you generate the graph?

a few years back I had 20 lbs of an Ethiopian that was an amazing blueberry bomb when roasted properly. Using my Behmor I managed to get 2 roasts out of 20 lbs that were exceptional and the rest were just coffee. I am admittedly not a very good roaster, but I find the Behmor makes it very hard to be consistent and very difficult to document what is actually happening so you can do it a second time.