Kind of Park

Photography, Coffee and Writing.

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  • Is Always August’s Ethiopia Harmufu Coffee Worth the Hype?

    Cupping Always August’s Ethiopia Harmufu Coffee : Is the Hype Justified?

    I recently bought beans from a specialty coffee company that’s been getting a lot of buzz lately, so I could cup them properly. I picked the beans up in person yesterday, from a cafe called Always August.

    A Visit to Always August

    Always August runs three locations — two in Mapo and one in Samgakji. I bought my beans from the Mangwon branch, tucked away in a residential neighbourhood.

    The space was a little over 30 square meter, with a charming, wood-forward interior. The espresso machine took up about half the bar, while hand drip coffee seemed to be brewed and served from the back of the counter.

    Small as it was, the shop also offered cookies and other desserts, which looked to be brought in from elsewhere rather than made on site. Three staff members were working, which felt like a generous number for the size of the place. Seating looked to be around 25 spots, and every one of them was taken.

    On the walk over, most of the other cafes I passed had plenty of empty seats. It struck me that a genuinely popular cafe really is a different animal. I liked the interior, and during the time I was there, the drinks being made and sent out all looked well put together. New customers kept arriving, only to turn away when they saw there was nowhere to sit.

    Choosing the Coffee

    The bean selection included one seasonal blend, two standard blends, and four single origins. Since my current interest is Ethiopia washed coffee, I went looking to see whether they had one.

    A coffee called Ethiopia Harmufu caught my eye. Checking the processing method, it was listed as modified washed. Reading the details, I learned it was a washed coffee with an extended fermentation stage — exactly the kind of coffee I was after, so I bought it. It came to 16,000 won per 100 grams, which isn’t cheap.

    A Closer Look at the Details

    A day after buying it, I went back and read the product page more carefully. The coffee is grown above 2,300 metres. That’s the kind of altitude the pricier Ethiopian green coffees arriving in Korea lately tend to come from, so the price made more sense once I saw that.

    The bean size is small — small even by the standards of Ethiopian coffee generally, which is typical of coffee grown at this kind of altitude. Looking at the beans, they didn’t appear to have been hand-picked. The roast colour sits towards the darker end of the light-roast range. The ground coffee smelled excellent, both in strength and in the range of aromas present.

    Cupping the Coffee

    I poured hot water over the grounds and, four minutes later, broke the crust at the top of the cup with a spoon. I skimmed off the floating foam and waited until the ten-minute mark to begin cupping.

    I run my cuppings in three time-based stages, starting at 10 minutes and moving in ten-minute increments. At each stage, I focus on catching the different characteristics the coffee reveals as it cools.

    In the first ten minutes, the coffee is still fairly hot, and this is when I get an overall impression and check the sweetness. The 20-minute mark is the core of the cupping — this is where I assess the coffee’s central character and acidity. From 30 minutes onward, I assess the clean cup, texture, aftertaste, and overall finish, and draw my conclusions.

    The Verdict

    Always August’s Ethiopia Harmufu modified washed coffee turned out, in cupping, to be an excellent coffee — strong floral and jasmine character, sweet acidity, and distinctive spice notes, all working well together. The quality and flavour justified the hype.

    What would I have done differently? I’d have paid closer attention to hand-picking, at both the green bean and roasted bean stage — the one finishing touch this coffee was missing. Fix that, and there’d have been nothing left to add.

  • Ethiopian Coffee Then and Now: Has More Detail Meant Better Flavour?

    Ethiopian Coffee Then and Now: Has More Detail Meant Better Flavour?

    You really do have to be careful with your palate. Once it’s calibrated to a certain level, it rarely settles back down again. To make matters worse, memory tends to gild the flavours of the past, so what we ate or drank years ago often gets remembered as better than it actually was.

    I’ve worked in the coffee industry for more than 13 years now. In that time I’ve roasted and tasted more coffees than I could ever count. Most of them have blurred together, but a few stand out clearly enough to write about. Today I want to talk about Ethiopian coffee.

    How Ethiopian Coffee Labelling Used to Work

    Ethiopian coffee wasn’t nearly as finely categorised as it is today. What came in was labelled with a simple grade and one of just two processing methods.

    In terms of naming, it went like this: first the country, Ethiopia; then the region, Yirgacheffe; then the grade, G1; and finally the processing method, washed. Four elements, and that was it.

    How Ethiopian Coffee Labelling Works Today

    Things look very different now. The country name stays the same, obviously, but the regional detail has multiplied. After the broad designation of Yirgacheffe comes a smaller sub-region such as Uraga.

    Often the name of the washing station gets added on top of that. After that might come the name of the exporter handling the coffee, or the name of the farmer who grew and processed it. Only then do the grade and processing method get tacked on at the end.

    Processing methods themselves have exploded from just two or three options in the past to what feels like hundreds today, if not more.

    Has All This Extra Detail Actually Improved the Coffee?

    Has Ethiopian coffee actually got better as it’s gone from that old simplicity to today’s dizzying complexity? In my experience, no.

    If anything, I feel the regional character is getting blurred, and the price has climbed far faster than the flavour has improved. It would be wonderful if quality rose in step with every extra line of information on the bag. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality.

    These days I often find myself missing the classic washed or natural Ethiopian coffees of the past. Even weighing the very best of each era against the other, it’s hard to say confidently that today’s coffee comes out ahead. To get a genuinely excellent Ethiopian coffee now, you have to pay a price that makes your eyes water.

    And even then, what you get is only roughly on par with — or maybe a touch better than — the good Ethiopian coffee of years ago. I don’t particularly want to romanticise the past, and it’s not really my style, but I do find myself thinking about the old Ethiopian coffees more often than I’d expect.

    Why Prices Keep Climbing

    Some of this quality gap is almost certainly down to environmental change. As temperatures rise and soil quality weakens, growers have to move to higher-altitude land to keep producing good Ethiopian coffee.

    The trouble is, the higher you go, the less farmable land there is — the available area shrinks exponentially with altitude. That naturally pushes prices up. All of these factors feed into each other, forming a loop that drives prices ever higher.

    Putting It to the Test: A Recent Ethiopian Coffee Comparison

    I recently tested a batch of Ethiopian coffees imported by several different companies. The lineup included coffees carrying an individual producer’s name, with prices ranging from the low twenty-thousands of won up to around forty thousand.

    After finishing the tests, the coffee I ended up choosing to use was a Uraga at a price in the low-to-mid twenty-thousands. The producer-named coffee, from Muleta Muntasha, turned out to be less impressive than I’d expected given the price.

    I keep learning the same lesson: an expensive coffee is no guarantee of great flavour. You shouldn’t buy a year’s worth of a coffee based on information or price alone.

    Testing Should Always Be Fair and Unbiased

    Every coffee deserves a fair, unbiased test. My own testing process covers the green bean’s appearance, its screen size distribution, how it behaves during roasting, its defect count, and a full flavour assessment. Not one of these steps can be skipped.

  • Library days.

    My schooldays mark the point where my memory begins. I have almost no memories from before I started school – just a couple of snapshots that have stuck, like photographs.

    Even those aren’t ones I particularly treasure. They’re more the kind of memory you register in passing – oh, there’s a bit of residue left – and move on from. My schooldays survive as a string of episodes.

    Many of those scenes take place inside the library. I spent most of my schooldays there. The library was packed with desks and chairs that gave you just enough discomfort and just enough privacy.

    The temperature and humidity were just right too. In that space of just-rightness, I felt at ease. I could arrive early and leave late.

    There, I skimmed through countless books, wrestled with countless problems, and wrote out countless words. I kept at it steadily, never quite sure whether it was efficient or not.

    What that space of just-rightness left me with was the shape of an adequate student, a soul that had had no end of stories pass through it, and a backside that had gone rather numb.

    That memory of a beginning has come back round to me now that I’m well into the middle of my life. And I find myself making similar memories again.

    There’s one small difference. Back then, there were few options besides going to the library. Now it’s different. There are countless things I could be doing instead.

    And yet I still go to the library. I go there now with a clear purpose. I’ve chosen the library as the place where I prepare to build the life, the version of myself, that I want.

    Here, I prepare for the future I want. I didn’t realise it at the time, but the library was where people with goals gathered, even back in my schooldays. That gathered will generates an energy all of its own.

    They say if you want to be rich, stay close to rich people. I’m in the library because I want to become someone who turns their goals into reality. And this place is full of exactly that kind of energy.

  • Aquarium reality.

    I sometimes find myself thinking that the real world we live in, though it feels vast and boundless enough for us, might actually be a very small space. Nor do I think the word “we” refers only to humankind and nothing beyond it.

    I think “we” includes beings beyond humankind as well. I think it’s possible that human reality has, in fact, been set up in something like an aquarium. Perhaps we’re simply one of the intelligent forms being tested and observed within an artificial environment.

    I sometimes think humanity’s intelligence might actually be at a fairly low level. There’s certainly no shortage of primitive incidents and accidents going on around us. I think there are beings near us operating at a level beyond humankind.

    I think they watch us, observe us, and, where needed, shine a light on the way forward. My existence alone is small enough to be negligible, but humanity as a whole must carry a different kind of worth. What are these higher beings near us for, and why are they guiding us?

    Is it their idea of intellectual entertainment? Or is there some other reason?

    Where these higher beings come from seems like the key question – whether they’re from outside our fishbowl of reality, or from within it. It would also be good to know whether they come from a different timeline altogether. It could even be that humanity from the distant future is trying to help humanity of the past.

  • Not a big deal.

    To me, “I” usually means everything.

    My glasses, my watch, my breakfast, my shop or my job – none of it means anything without me. Looking after myself is the most important thing in the world, and it ought to come first.

    And yet many of us, myself included, put something else first, driving ourselves on while neglecting ourselves. That’s not how it should be. Whatever comes before ourselves shouldn’t be something worldly.

    We should remember that we arrive empty-handed and leave empty-handed. We shouldn’t forget how fleeting the time we’re given really is. In that brief span, what we truly need to look after and cultivate is ourselves.

    A person’s character and wisdom are what’s genuinely worth having, worth cultivating. Material things are just material things. Is the most expensive watch or car meaningfully better than the cheapest one?

    Looked at in the present moment, the difference might seem real, but if we remember how fleeting our time is, and view it against the whole span of human history, that difference can amount to splitting hairs. How laughable do the functional differences between watches or modes of transport from just a few centuries ago look to us now? Barely any difference at all.

    People of that era would have lived better lives had they put their energy into character and wisdom rather than into the watches or carriages of their day. And the same holds true today. Chase value and meaning, not material things.

    If the influence of just one person – me – gives positive, constructive help to two or more others, then that’s a life, and a time, well spent.

    Let’s look after the people around us properly. Let’s extend that positive influence even to people we barely know.

    Let’s spend our precious time striving to become someone capable of that. And above all, let’s look after ourselves well.