DAK – Mango Tango 250g | Ethiopia

About This Coffee

Mango Tango is a natural Ethiopian from Danche, a washing station in the Chelbesa area of the Gedeo zone. DAK have bought from Danche repeatedly through this harvest and rate it among their favourite stations of the year, which is the sort of thing worth knowing about a station: it means someone tasted a lot of tables and kept coming back to the same one.

Danche is a collection point rather than an estate. Surrounding smallholders bring cherry in from plots of one to two hectares, farmed on the steep ground between roughly 2000 and 2300 metres, and the station's job is to take that incoming fruit and turn it into something consistent. That is harder than it sounds. A single day's intake comes from many different plots picked to many different standards, and the quality of a station is mostly the quality of what it refuses.

The specific lot here is Bildimoo Danche #8, grown at around 2200 metres. The variety is listed as Heirloom — the working term for the indigenous local types that make up most Ethiopian production, genetically diverse enough that no cultivar name would be accurate.

It is processed as a natural. Whole cherries are dried with the fruit intact, and at this altitude that takes time, because cool nights slow everything down. The long, cool dry is what keeps a natural of this type expressive without tipping into the heavy fermented character that faster drying at lower elevation tends to produce.

In the cup: mango, strawberry candy and mandarine. Tropical and sweet at the front, with the mandarine giving it a lift at the finish.

Freshly roasted by DAK Coffee Roasters in Amsterdam and imported to the UK by ROAST EDIT Co.