Nicaraguan Adix Espresso
This coffee first came to us as a random raw, green coffee sample, accompanied by a rash of emails. I am going to save you the whole story here, but this is the second harvest in a 3-year journey, to try and get you this coffee at its peak.
This lot has travelled around the world like Phileas Fogg, yet the journey time was about 9 months, not the normal 80 days. The wildness in the coffee has fled, but there is a great, deep espresso here that will cut through all of the milks and make great cold brew. Stuff happens in life, and rather than throwing this away or putting it in a blend, let’s enjoy it for what it is. The coffee is tasting great, and this is a bargain!
Farm: Ad-Ix (Standing for Adrian and Ixil)
Area: El Chimborazo, Jinotega
Process: Natural
Varietal: Red Catuai
Altitude: 1200 Meters above sea level
Adix should read as Adrian and Ixil. The name that rhymes with addicts and an onomatopoeia, my long word of the week! (Sounds like what it is- Pow! Bam! Any excuse for an old-school Batman reference. The wife (Ixil), who is a 4th-generation coffee farmer, and Adrian (husband of the team/ partnership) is of Swiss origin. I have written a bit more here.
Apart from being a micro-producer, Adix are buyers and a processor of green coffee.
The Ad-Ix plantation used to be a Carrot farm and was transformed into a Glorious Coffee Plantation and a fantastic place to visit 🙂 “We produce coffee naturally, natural products that we make ourselves, as we love regenerative farming”, mixed with stuff we know is ok. We produce only about 75 sacks per year, which is why this plantation allows us to focus on QUALITY over quantity. We know how many coffee trees we have, when we do what, and when the bees come to visit.
Ixil is persistent. If you have 4 minutes, when you see this, maybe you will understand why. It is a wider purpose than just coffee quality….
We are in our 3rd season with AdIx. In researching this coffee, I have spent quite a lot of time and realised how close I came to losing this story.
Before you plan brewing this, a week or two to rest (leave to improve after roasting) will improve it and make your life easier, too. Especially with darker roast coffees
If you want big milk-based drinks, or what we refer to as over 9oz in the roastery, then you may require a bigger dose. I think I need to explain this somewhere else. Watch this space!
16-17g (ish!) of ground coffee into 33-34g of espresso in 25-30 seconds
9oz: Incredibly sweet, malty and milk-chocolatey.
6oz: carob, Malt, sweet cocoa
16-17g (ground coffee in) 45-50g out 30-ish seconds. Don’t stress it, taste it. Little tweaks can make big differences. This is just a guide to help you find the sweet spot.
For me, this has a teasing sweetness, soft, rounded acidity. This is probably most people’s perfect natural, where you have all of the sweetness and less of the wild fruit ripeness. The best espresso version I have had (of this coffee so far) has been the coffee jack 2. Brewing with 4-6 bars of pressure gave more defined brown sugars and dried fruit, and maybe, just maybe, I was playing and brewing for pleasure, not pure evaluation! As the pressure increased, so did the acidity, to a degree. Above 7 bars, there is a grapefruity element on the finish.
