#FlavourTectonics - Recommendation of the week

by Flavour Tectonics, an interest group of like minded individuals exploring the world of flavours in all kinds of drinks.

In line with the brew and chill event this coming Wednesday, we have a coffee recommendation for you guys. This is a lovely coffee roasted by our local roaster Quarter Life Coffee, the Mesina Supernatural.

There is a very good reason behind this super cool name, and it has nothing to do with any paranormal activity, but it do be tasting divine. This coffee is harvested by local smallholder farms in Mesina, Adola, in Ethiopia, and is of the Local Landraces, and JARC 74, a mix of local spontaneous varietal and a disease resistant varietal developed in a research facility. In most African coffee producing regions, farm owners do not have their own processing facilities, instead, they send their coffees to washing stations to collective process the cherries into pre-roasted coffee beans, known as coffee greens. This particular coffee was processed in the Mesina washing station before it was exported all over the world for our consumption.

As previously mentioned, the reason for the intriguing name has to do with the way this coffee was processed in the washing station. There are three different types of fermentation processes that coffee goes through to be de-pulped and prepped as greens, washed, honey, and natural. There are also many other experimental processing methods that you can find on the market right now, and this coffee went through one of them. It is an extend natural process, where the cherries were manually harvested at its ripest moments, and dried on a raised platform for 20 days as a single layer to ensure maximum exposure to the sun. They were also sorted twice a day during the drying process to ensure the quality of the resultant coffee. It is then de-pulped and processed as coffee greens.

We think this coffee is like Geoffery Bawa’s works, it emanates the essence of tropicality, complexity, and subtle nuances that are seemingly incoherent, but when put together, it is eccentrically beautiful. When brewing this coffee, the intense aroma of ripe tropical fruits, cocoa, and even a rich vanilla fragrance will fill your room. Upon the first sip, the flavours of watermelon, jackfruit will strike your palate, and feel the lush, silky texture glides along your tongue. It then coats your mouth with a lingering sweetness of cacao and lavender. As it cools, the tropical fruits become more prominent, and the floral notes recede to unveil more intense sweetness from the cacao.

This is an exceptional coffee, and definitely worth experiencing at least once in your lifetime. You can get a bag of beans from quarterlifecoffee.com along with some other interesting beans, or you can head down to Singapore Art Book Fair this weekend, and get a brewed cuppa from the Balestier Market Collective pop-up, at SAM Tanjong Pagar District Park.