Oct 10 2008
Yemen Mohka Sharasi: Redemption of sorts
This time, I paid close attention to its progress. I set the Nesco to 23 minute and watched closely, engaging the cooling cycle a minute early, giving it a 22 minute roast. I also wasted no time in pulling off the top seal and chaff cup and dumping the newly roasted bean into a waiting jar. Burnt hands be damned, I was not going to over cook this batch. The roast turned out great. It was right on the full city side of things, being a nice uniform dark brown, just the way I like it.
I had been delaying roasting up my third batch of the Yemen Mohka Sharasi for about a week, still smarting from the bad taste experience I had got from the accidental Vienna Roast that I had made before. Although the Sweet Marias peeps say that this coffee is just as good in an ultra dark roast with a “rustic sweetness” and “buttery body intense flavors” shining throughout the city+ to Vienna spectrum, I found the dark roast just a bit too chalky and charcoal like for my taste.
I was a bit worried that it was not the roast but the bean. Perhaps this varietal just did not mesh with me. Hey, it happens, but usually how it works is that I just get sick of the flavor and need to set it aside for some time and give my palate something else to experience (The aged sumatra is a good example of this). But maybe, just maybe, I had found a bean that I plain just don’t dig (Impossible!) .
The next morning I brewed some up using one of my last Chemex coffee filters and sipped with trepidation. At last, I can say that the Yemen Mohka is umm, a damn fine cup of coffee. You can certainly taste the “rustic” quailty in it anyway, and the aftertaste does have fruity notes. Still, there is also a sense of the charcoal, mixed in with a bit of the cocoa and for some reason this taste is just not meshing with me at the time. Apparently, it was not all in the roast.
Well, I cannot really say that the Yemen Mokha Sharasi is a great cup of coffee, I also will not that it is bad. I guess it would fall into the middle somewhere. It is definitely third place amongst the the other two coffees (Perros Bravos, Organic Ethiopian DP) that I had purchased along with it.I guess they all can’t be winners.
