Brewing Anaerobic Natural Geisha: Key Points for a Sweet, Fragrant Cup

Anaerobic natural Geisha offers intense aroma and complex flavors, but brewing it can easily lead to bitter and sour results. This article uses Eleta from Panama's 90+ estate as an example to explain why this bean uses the anaerobic natural process and how it differs from regular Geisha in density, drainage speed, and extraction efficiency. We share brewing experience on adjusting grind size and water temperature for heavily fermented beans.

Eleta is a Geisha produced by the 90+ estate, which first applied special processing methods to Geisha. Its anaerobic natural processing involves longer fermentation that transforms organic substances, creating complex layers. Besides wine-like aroma, it offers sweet fruit notes like longan, sweet orange, and pineapple. However, many brew it poorly by copying methods for regular Geisha, leading to polarized bitter or sour cups.

Anaerobic natural Geisha has an intense aroma and complex flavors, but many coffee lovers easily end up with extreme results that are both bitter and sour when brewing it. This article uses Eleta from Panama's 90+ estate as an example to explain why this bean uses the anaerobic natural process, and how it differs from regular Geisha in density, drainage speed, and extraction efficiency. Front Street Coffee will share brewing experience on how to adjust grind size and water temperature for heavily fermented beans, so that sweetness notes like wine, longan, sweet orange, and pineapple come through more clearly, while also touching on why 90+ estate and Ninety Plus Geisha are so famous in the specialty coffee world.

Eleta is a Geisha produced by the 90+ estate. The 90+ estate was the first in the industry to apply special processing methods to Geisha, so in recent years its name appears in many books discussing coffee development. This Eleta is no exception — it uses 90+'s special technique for anaerobic natural processing.

The longer anaerobic fermentation prompts full transformation of organic substances within the beans, giving the coffee quite complex flavor layers. Besides the rich wine aroma brought by fermentation, this bean also offers high-sweetness fruit notes like longan, sweet orange, and pineapple.

However, this bean is indeed quite special, and many friends often don't know how to "handle" it after buying it. Although the aroma is full, on the palate it's either on the bitter side or painfully sour, with obvious polarization that makes it uncomfortable. So today Front Street Coffee will talk about how to brew this Eleta so it's both aromatic and sweet.

Brewing Sharing

Many friends fail to brew this Geisha well because they overlook that it's a heavily fermented coffee and simply copy the brewing approach for regular Geisha. Usually, regular-process Geisha, being on the lighter roast side with higher density, is extracted with a finer grind and higher water temperature. But anaerobically processed beans have the opposite characteristics: low density, fast drainage, and easy extraction.

If you still use the same grind size, it will be too coarse for this bean, and combined with fast drainage, it easily causes under-extraction, producing negative notes like sharp acidity and astringency; if the drainage speed is controlled, this Geisha will instead over-extract due to overly high extraction efficiency, producing negative notes like bitterness, astringency, and muddiness.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.