How does the natural coffee bean process shape Sidamo flavor?

Sidamo, a leading Ethiopian specialty region, relies mainly on the natural process, which dries whole cherries and yields intense sweetness, fruit-juice character, and fermented notes. Yirgacheffe is dominated by washed lots, while Sidamo runs washed and natural side by side. The result is a cup with clearer fruit acidity, smooth body, and floral or herbal accents.

Sidamo green beans look grayish with uneven particle size, and washed and natural versions diverge in aroma: natural lots lean floral with a slight earthy edge, washed lots show nut-like fruit and mild cocoa. Light to medium roasts suit single-origin pour-over, while medium to dark roasts work in blends and as an espresso base. Different coffee bean process choices and types of coffee seeds explain much of that spread.

Sidamo is a highly representative specialty coffee region in Ethiopia, primarily using the natural process, with intense flavors, prominent sweetness, and notes of fermentation and fruit juice. This article starts from Sidamo's origin terroir, variety characteristics, and the differences between natural and washed processing methods, sorts out the stories behind well-known coffees such as Huakui and Santa Vini, and shares the pour-over parameters and flavor performance of Front Street's Sidamo natural beans, helping coffee enthusiasts gain a comprehensive understanding of this region's unique charm.

If washed Yirgacheffe is the face of Ethiopian specialty coffee, unforgettable at first sip with its clear fruit and floral aromas—even making you wonder whether you're holding a cup of coffee or a cup of fruit tea—then what does another star region from Ethiopia, Sidamo, have to offer?

Sidamo and Yirgacheffe both belong to Ethiopia's specialty coffee landscape. The Yirgacheffe region is dominated by the washed process, while Sidamo uses both washed and natural processes in parallel, with natural as the main method. Front Street's two coffees from the Sidamo region both use the natural process. Front Street believes that natural beans are more prominent than washed beans in flavor intensity, sweetness, and fermentation character, drinking with a distinctly juice-like quality. Overall, washed and natural each have their own merits, and both are choices coffee lovers find hard to give up.

Sidamo's Unique Aroma and Mouthfeel

Sidamo green beans are grayish in color, with uneven particle sizes—some coarse, some fine. Its acidity can be soft or sharp, its body can be heavy or light, and it combines sweetness with spice, making it one of the representatives of garden-grown coffee in the southern highlands of Ethiopia. Compared with most African coffees, Sidamo's fruit acidity is clearer, its mouthfeel is smooth, and it carries delicate floral and herbal notes.

Natural Sidamo leans toward floral notes but carries a slight earthy taste; the washed version presents nut-like fruit aromas with a mild cocoa note. What they share is a smooth mouthfeel, moderate viscosity, and pleasant acidity and aroma. Light or medium roasts suit single-origin brewing, while medium or dark roasts suit blends and serve as an excellent base for quality espresso.

Washed Sidamo green beans are light green, small in size, elongated oval in shape, plump, and uniform in overall quality, with a fragrant, mellow aroma. After sipping, the finish is long, carrying a kind of wild beauty. It is elegant yet somewhat playful, gentle and pleasant on entry, followed by bright lemon acidity that delivers a strong taste impact. The mouthfeel is unique and full-bodied, the sweetness is distinctive and appealing, and the aftertaste rises slowly, bearing a unique sweetness.

Ethiopian Coffee

In Ethiopia, coffee farming is both the main livelihood for most people and an important source of national income; the coffee crop has long been deeply woven into the local cultural and economic fabric. Ethiopia is the world's sixth-largest coffee producer. According to reports, in 2018 about 100 million people worldwide were directly or indirectly engaged in the coffee industry, and Ethiopia's coffee workers accounted for 20% of that. In 2017, the country produced about 470,000 tons of green coffee beans, of which about 160,000 tons were exported, meaning Ethiopia exports less than half of its total production, with the rest consumed domestically.

Ethiopia's coffee cultivation is mainly concentrated in the western and southern regions, with more than half using the smallholder model, also known as garden coffee, which is Ethiopia's most important mode of production. It is reported that nearly 1.2 million households in the area make a living by growing coffee, with each household cultivating no more than 4 hectares. So-called garden coffee refers to farmers managing coffee trees mixed with other cash crops in their own backyards, usually planted alongside banana trees, creating a unique green landscape in every household's front and back yards.

Because smallholder coffee production is limited, there are farmer cooperatives or processing stations of various sizes in the area responsible for processing green coffee beans from that region. Each harvest season, farmers pack the fruit from their own coffee trees and deliver it to a nearby processing station (cooperative) established close to a water source for unified processing, after which it is sold under the processing station's name. For example, the Gutingting Cooperative coffee beans on Front Street's bean list are made from coffee cherries grown in Yirgacheffe town; farmers deliver them to the town for unified washing, and the final product is produced under the cooperative's name and sold around the world.

Sidamo

Sidamo is one of Ethiopia's highest-yielding coffee-growing regions, producing large quantities of high-quality green coffee beans every year. The region took shape after Ethiopia broke free from Italian rule in 1942, and its name derives from the local indigenous Sidamo people. Through cupping, Front Street has found that Sidamo coffee is known for its rich, full-bodied mouthfeel, with complex sweetness and aroma, crisp and gentle acidity, and a long finish. For example, Santa Vini and Huakui on Front Street's bean list both come from the famous Sidamo.

Sidamo's coffee flavors are extremely diverse. Different soil types, microclimates, and countless native coffee varieties, combined with the region's towering mountains, highlands, plateaus, valleys, and plains, create rich and varied terrain. The geology here consists of nutrient-rich, well-drained volcanic soil, with a soil depth of nearly two meters, and topsoil that is dark brown or brown.

Therefore, in order to let coffee enthusiasts taste the flavors of different regions in Ethiopia, the birthplace of coffee, Front Street has brought in over a dozen Ethiopian coffees from different regions, covering both natural and washed, enough to satisfy everyone's love of coffee.

Sidamo's greatest advantage lies in maintaining soil fertility through the cycling of organic matter, relying on fallen leaves from surrounding trees or plant residues as fertilizer. This also creates obvious differences and distinctive characteristics among coffees produced in different towns. In 2010–2012, Sidamo continuously received high scores of 92 to 94 from the authoritative American coffee evaluation website CR. This shows the extraordinary strength of the region's green beans.

Guji Region

In Front Street's view, Sidamo's most resounding representative is none other than Huakui coffee. Huakui comes from Hambella, located in Guji, Ethiopia's largest coffee-producing region. Administratively it belongs to Oromia State and was once part of the Sidamo region, but in 2010 it was made an independent new region by the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX). Western Hambella faces Yirgacheffe's Kochere across the mountains, separated by a highland 3,200 meters above sea level and about 30 kilometers wide. The significant day-night temperature difference created by its geography gives the area all the terroir conditions for producing high-quality specialty coffee. Hambella borders the Guji sub-regions of Shakiso, Uraga, and Kersa to the southeast, north, and south respectively, and is Ethiopia's highest-altitude coffee sub-region.

At present, the Hambella region has nearly 20 processing stations of various sizes. In 2017, Ethiopia's DW Green Bean Company sent their coffee beans to the TOH (the Taste Of Harvest) green bean competition hosted by the African Coffee Association. A natural batch from the "Buku Abel" processing station won the TOH Ethiopia championship with its intense strawberry and cream aroma. That year, this batch of green beans was introduced into China by Beijing green bean trader Hongshun. In the same year, Li Jianfei won second place in the 2017 World Brewers Cup China with this bean. This Ethiopian bean stood out remarkably among many Geisha entries, and was therefore given the name "Huakui." (Geisha means geisha in Japanese, and Huakui means the chief of geishas, used here to indicate this bean's excellence.)

Subsequently, DW Company added processing stations in Dimtu, the core production area of Hambella, namely "Buku Abel," "Buku Saysay," "Haro Soresa," and "Tirtiro Goye," with an annual coffee output of about 1,100 tons. Looking at the growing regions and processing stations, among all these estates and processing stations, only the processing area of the "Buku Abel" processing station covers the small production site that originally produced the natural coffee bean "Huakui." In other words, only the natural coffee beans produced and processed by Buku Abel can truly be called "Huakui." Coffee is an agricultural product closely tied to each year's climate and environment, so the flavor of the beans each year still differs slightly. To distinguish each year's Huakui coffee beans, DW Company named them Huakui 2.0, Huakui 3.0, Huakui 3.1, Huakui 4.0, Huakui 5.0, Huakui 6.0, and this year, 2024, Huakui 8.0 has also been listed and meets everyone.

Arsi Region

Arsi is also a coffee region within the Sidamo coffee-producing area. West Arsi is located between the famous Yirgacheffe coffee-growing area and Hararge, in the western part of the Sidamo region. The area's name comes from a branch of the Oromo people who have long lived there. West Arsi consists of three woredas (Ethiopia's third-level administrative divisions): Arsi, Bale, and East Shewa. About 88.52% of West Arsi's population is Oromo, which is very important in coffee history because they were the first tribe in human history to drink coffee, and half of the coffee produced in Ethiopia comes from this region.

Coffee cultivation in the West Arsi region uses the smallholder model. The average smallholder farm is not large, about 2 to 3 hectares, but even so it is often slightly larger than the usual 1.5 to 2 hectares in most parts of Ethiopia. Although current coffee-growing techniques are still in a stage of development, compared with other regions, coffee-growing techniques in West Arsi have developed very rapidly. Coffee farmers do not need to hire temporary or full-time workers, but instead select coffee with the help of family members. This allows them to better control coffee quality, and processing stations usually pay extra for fully ripe red cherries, greatly increasing farmers' motivation.

Huakui Coffee Bean Variety

Huakui's variety, like most Ethiopian coffee beans, belongs to Ethiopia's local landraces, namely Heirloom. In Ethiopia, the garden planting system is the cultivation model on which the vast majority of smallholder coffee farmers depend for survival, and Heirloom landraces come from the "unknown varieties" in their backyards. The coffee trees may have been left by a previous owner of the land, shared among neighbors, or grown from seeds from another region. Various coffee plants are interplanted with other cash crops on the land and are picked and sold only when ripe.

Therefore, Heirloom does not refer to a single type of coffee variety; it represents a blend of green beans from the place of origin. The coffee gathers the harvests of multiple smallholders from the same period and is combined together. A single batch may contain dozens or even hundreds of unclassified varieties. Precisely because there are differences among varieties and each mixing method is different, these coffees vary in bean size, dimensions, and shape—some large, some small, some long, some round—and can be understood as a "blended batch."

Coffee Bean Processing Methods

Sidamo coffee beans are processed by both washed and natural methods. In the washed method, after selecting high-quality cherries, the skin and pulp are removed, then the beans are soaked and fermented in a tank, and afterward dried until the moisture content is about 12%. The natural method is relatively much simpler: it uses direct sunlight to dry the cherries until the moisture content is about 12%, then removes the skin and pulp.

Different processing methods also lead to different flavors in the coffee beans. Washed processing better expresses Sidamo coffee beans' original citrus acidity and floral and herbal aromas, while natural processing adds aroma on top of the original flavor.

Front Street Sidamo Natural Coffee Bean Pour-Over Parameters:

Regarding coffee brewing, Front Street has always believed that the freshness of coffee beans has a huge impact on flavor. Therefore, all coffee beans shipped by Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee) are within 5 days of the roast date. Front Street's roasting philosophy is "freshly roasted good coffee," so that every customer who places an order receives it in the freshest condition. Coffee's resting period is about 4 to 7 days, so when customers receive it, it is exactly at its best flavor.

For this light-roasted Sidamo coffee, Front Street chose: V60 dripper, water temperature 90°C, water-to-coffee ratio 1:15, coffee dose 15g, grind size (80% passing a Chinese No. 20 standard sieve).

Use staged extraction, blooming with 2 times the coffee dose in water, that is, 30 grams of water for a 30-second bloom. The reason blooming is needed is to let the coffee grounds release internal carbon dioxide, thereby making the later stages of extraction more stable. Pour in a small stream in circles until 125 grams, then pause, continue pouring until 225 grams and stop. After the water in the dripper has dripped through, remove the dripper. Start timing from the beginning of pouring; the extraction time is 2'00". Next, pick up the entire cup of coffee, swirl it to mix, then pour it into a cup and taste.

[Front Street Natural Sidamo Coffee Flavor]: Floral and fruity aromas are very obvious—citrus, passion fruit, strawberry, oolong tea—with very high sweetness.

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