Brandywine does a collaboration for Halloween with Fellow Drops, which is an interesting service from Fellow that promotes one or two high end coffees a week. I’m a sucker for a good special occasion edition, key word being good. Brandywine is the roaster I trust to deliver good, so this is my Halloween week coffee.
This coffee is pretty tame, relatively speaking to my recent fare and Brandywine in general, a pure Ethiopian natural process coffee from the Chelbesa station in Gedeb, reasonably lightly roasted. 15g coffee, 40 second bloom, 250g water total starting around 95 degrees. Brew time was 2.55. Fellow recommends a more coffee heavy recipe, which I’ll try, and I’ll grind a bit finer next time, but my default recipe handled this very well. Just a beautiful, plump Ethiopian coffee. I didn’t get the big red fruit notes mentioned in their listing, but I do get the creamy body and as expected lovely sweetness.
It’s tame in the sense that Brandywine is better known for their coferments or infusions, pretty weird coffee. My most recent posts have also been on weird, heavily manipulated coffees from Luminous and Black and White.
In terms of quality, it’s excellent. People unfamiliar with natural process coffee might find it a little odd, but it’s still very coffee flavored, just more lush.
I’ve put some serious thoughts into what I pay for coffee. I wrote about it at some length in a recent post about Luminous, which is a good bit more costly.
If this is outside what you’d like to pay, I understand. It’s well past the point of diminishing returns.
That said, Brandywine roasts some of the best coffee in the world and I’m drinking it for $1.55 a cup, including the filter. Coffee is a hobby to me. I can afford an extra dollar a day to go from meh to best in the world. My demand is pretty inelastic near this price point; I would pay a lot more than $1.55 a cup and not change my coffee habits at all.
I appreciate the reply. Sounds like it’s worth the try.
If they have a store, I’ll probably add it to my pit stop on a road trip.
Trying it before you buy is very reasonable. I’ve given people coffee similar to what Brandywine does best and gotten blank looks. It doesn’t look like they have an official coffee shop but inevitably near any premium roaster there is a good cafe selling their coffee.