Tropical Weather Coffee Bean

Southern Weather has a sibling. Do you know that person who shows up to family gatherings around the holidays wearing floral shirts buttoned only mid-way up their torso while sporting a deep-set sunglass tan? This blend is that person. Tropical Weather will transport you from a chilly Polar Vortex to a balmier destination for a lot less than that all-inclusive resort ticket you’ve been eying. A 50/50 blend of Ethiopian washed and natural processed micro-lots, this coffee bursts with notes of stone fruit, and finishes with a tropical fruit note so pleasant you can almost hear the ocean's waves.

BLEND APPROACH
Tropical Weather arose out of our love for coffees from Ethiopia. Each season, our partners at origin work tirelessly to process both washed and natural coffees that are exquisite in their own differing cup profiles. We found that by taking a delicately floral and juicy washed coffee and blending it with a pungent and intense natural, we could have a cup that was greater than the sum of its parts. Our approach to creating blends is a bit different at Onyx. For Tropical Weather, we select a few washed and natural Ethiopian coffees that we feel fit the profile of the blend. We then adjust the ratio of the two coffees in the roast in order to strike a balance between the pungent natural and the delicate washed component. Feel excited that the coffee you are tasting is always in season, and therefore, it is cupping and tasting to its full potential. We will never compromise our commitment to high-quality coffees and blends, whether it’s a single origin release or a blend component. You will not find Onyx buying “blender” coffees to save cost or prolong a good coffee. We also always keep blends to three coffees or less and maintain ratios in the build. This way, what you extract is the flavor profile we designed. Currently Tropical Weather is Ethiopia (Gedeb) Gotiti Grade 1 and Ethiopia Biloya Natural.

NATURALLY PROCESSED COFFEE
Natural coffees are beautiful…Okay, natural coffees are beautiful when done properly, but can be equally terrible when things go wrong. Natural processing, or dry processing, refers to the act of drying and fermenting coffee inside the cherry. Long before the age of portafilter tattoos and dual-boiler home espresso machines, coffee was picked and dried this way out of convenience. It is, to this day, still the most convenient and economically friendly way to process coffee cherries. (It’s estimated that dry-processing can use up to 90% less water than the washing process.) So why isn’t all coffee processed this way? Well, as coffee made its way across the world, it was commoditized and standardized, just like all other products spread by colonialism, but that’s a whole other story... Adding to the boom of washed processing, the natural process method can be tricky to get right, due to the delicate nature of fermentation and drying. What does all this have to do with the final cup? Well, when you leave the skin and fruit of the coffee cherry on the seed throughout fermentation and drying, that fruit begins to break down, imparting esters that lend delicate florals and big fruit notes into the seed that will survive the roasting process. If it’s rushed or handled incorrectly, this fruit rot can lend off-flavors to the coffee, making the final cup dirty or ‘fermenty.’ Basically, that single cherry begins to slowly decay, and controlling that delicate action through advanced technique and metrics allow us to drink wonderfully floral and fruity coffees. We have long promoted natural processed coffees, and Tropical Weather is just one of the reasons we do.