The Best of Colombia by 85+ Specialty Coffee

What I’m Brewing

Sep 11

If you are just getting into specialty coffee, you would have come across a term called cup score. Lucky for us that this process has been standardized by the SCA. The coffees are analyzed by professional tasters called Q Graders, very much like a sommelier who is a wine expert. The coffee is scored out of 100, and a score of 80 and up qualifies as specialty coffee.

*Source: Specialty Coffee Q Grade Score Sheet from* *The Specialty Coffee Company*

The table above should help you identify the different grades of coffee. It’s the 80+ scoring coffee that tantalize our tastebuds. Let’s go back to peak COVID time when half of the UAE was benched at home. Only essential trips were allowed and buying a cup of coffee in a cafe wasn’t one of them. A lot of roasteries had started catering to home brewers and this is when I came across 85+ Specialty Coffee on Instagram for the first time.

I still think about the Twumba from time-to-time, it was the winner of the 2018 Cup of Excellence, and for many reasons: the aromatic orange blossom as soon as you open the bag, prominent berry notes transmuting to black tea notes as it cooled down. One of the best Rwandan I have had, that’s for sure.

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85+ Specialty Coffee was founded in 2020 by Nooran Amer and Mohammed Seif. The co-founding siblings had one focus in mind: the quality of their coffee was too important to settle for anything less. Hence, they procured minimum 85 points scoring coffee, and supplied them within the UAE.

Nouran talks about their first coffee release in an interview with FLTR Magazine, “Our first single-origin coffees which we sourced directly from our partners in Rwanda and Congo have been a great introduction for many of our customers to the great qualities of African coffees, which they have tried with us for the very first time.”

Two years later, their focus remains the same. The cup is just as good if not better, and they have been consistently releasing treats from a variety of origins. I want to focus on their latest release from my favorite origin — Colombia. The producers are involved in many innovative processing techniques in this region resulting in a variety of flavor notes that is truly bewildering.

The Baya is a washed Tabi and some of tasting notes points to a classic Colombian, nectarine and peach are primaries ending with a smooth dark chocolate. There is a sweet lingering aftertaste, and the strength of the acidity depending largely on the brewing method. My choice of brewer was the Simplify, but I saw myself reaching for the Hario V60 from time-to-time. The trade off in the former, sweetness over brightness, which I really enjoyed in this coffee.

Have you tried the Baya?