Ethiopia · Sidama
Tadesse Mekonnen
"They don't just buy the coffee — they ask what we're trying. The seventy-two-hour anaerobic was our experiment. They bet on it before anyone else did. Now my neighbours are copying our tanks."
Our Story
Most coffee is made. Ours is engineered.
A five-chapter account of how we turned fermentation into a craft — and why the cup in your hand is never quite like anyone else's.
Curiosity.
My first anaerobic coffee was on a café terrace in Paris — an Ethiopia from Sidama, fermented 72 hours without oxygen. It tasted like ripe fruit. Nothing like the coffee I knew.
For years it was my morning. Then I moved to New York and couldn't find anything close. What I did find was usually too wild to enjoy, different in every batch, or sold with more marketing than information.
So I started making the coffee I couldn't buy. — Alex, founder
I'm a data scientist; I spend my days tuning variables. Coffee obsesses over origin and altitude but leaves fermentation — the variable that changes the cup most — to chance. So I started running it myself. The early lots came out too wild, even for me. That set the standard: controlled, not funky. Consistent, not lucky. Specific, not vague.
Anaerobic is the coffee I couldn't buy. Sealed environments, measured hours, named variables — a cup that tastes like the fruit it came from.
Craft.
Anaerobic fermentation, done well, is a deliberate act. Cherries are sealed inside oxygen-free environments and held there — sometimes for 36 hours, sometimes for 120 — while temperature, pH and time are measured as carefully as any chemistry experiment. Think of it the way a winemaker thinks of maceration: an interval during which flavor is not merely preserved but built. The environment does nothing on its own. We do.
Fermentation stages
Cherry
Hand-picked at peak ripeness; Brix measured on arrival.
Sealed environment
Oxygen displaced; CO₂ takes over. Yeast rewrites the profile.
Controlled temp
Held at 18–22°C; pH tracked every six hours.
Wash
Mucilage removed at the precise moment flavor peaks.
Dry
Raised beds; turned hourly; 12–18 days to parchment.
The takeaway. Fermentation is not a step. It is the craft. Everything after — the roast, the grind, your pour — is us trying not to ruin it.
The environment does nothing on its own. We do.
The Network.
Every lot on our shelf is the work of someone whose name belongs on the bag — and usually isn't. Fermentation, more than any other stage, is decided at origin. What follows is a beginning.
Colombia · Huila
Lucía Velázquez
"I have been picking cherries for thirty years. Only in the last five have I been asked what I thought about the profile. My father would not recognise the conversations we have with Anaerobic. But he would recognise the respect."
Costa Rica · Tarrazú
Manuel Vargas
"Thirty-six hours of anaerobic honey processing — the first time we tried it, I thought we had wasted the lot. The cup told me otherwise. Now it is our signature. Anaerobic asked for it before I trusted it myself."
Three voices of many. We print the farm, the variety, the altitude and the fermentation window on every bag — because the people behind the cup are the story, and a bag without a name is just a commodity in a better-looking jacket.
The Science.
Anaerobic processing does something measurable. Under low-oxygen conditions, the yeast and bacteria on the cherry produce volatile compounds that simply do not form in conventional fermentation — more than forty new ones, according to peer-reviewed gas-chromatography work.
1That is not marketing. That is a lab instrument. The diagram below groups those compounds into six sensory families — red fruit, floral, tropical, caramel, vinous, spice — each responsible for a specific kind of note you may have read on a tasting card without knowing where it came from.
¹ Volatile profiles under controlled-anaerobic conditions are documented across multiple peer-reviewed gas-chromatography studies of Coffea arabica post-harvest. Compound counts vary with varietal, altitude, vessel design and hold-time; "forty new" refers to compounds elevated to sensory-threshold concentrations in anaerobic lots versus washed controls.
If you want to go further
- Exploring the impacts of postharvest processing on the aroma formation of coffee beans — a review Food Chemistry
- The role of microbes in coffee fermentation and their impact on coffee quality Journal of Food Quality
- The crucial role of yeasts in wet coffee fermentation — a review Applied Food Research
- Inoculation of starter cultures in a semi-dry coffee fermentation process Food Microbiology
Forty-plus compounds, nameable in a lab, identifiable in a cup.
The Ritual.
The bag lands on your doorstep in a box that weighs nothing and smells of almost nothing — which is, for coffee this fresh, the first small signal that something has been done differently.
You cut the seal. The room changes. Somewhere behind stone fruit, there is cocoa; behind the cocoa, something closer to port. You grind. You pour. You wait the minute it takes for the bloom to settle. And then, for thirty seconds, you are drinking the specific ninety-six hours that a sealed environment in Sidama or Huila spent under somebody's careful attention — coffee, closer to the fruit it came from than you knew it could be — funnelled now into a cup the size of your two hands.
Most mornings do not feel like this. That is fine. We only need them to feel like it sometimes.
Step 01
Grind medium-coarse.
The flavor wants room to breathe. Medium-coarse for a V60; a little coarser for a Chemex.
Step 02
Bloom 45 seconds.
Twice the grounds' weight in water, just off the boil. Let the CO₂ leave. Wait it out.
Step 03
Pour slow.
1:15 ratio, three pours, three minutes total. Taste the difference a calm hand makes.
Step 01
Grind fine; dose 18–20 g.
Distribute evenly in the basket, then tamp level with about thirty pounds of pressure — the same cup to cup. Lighter roasts are denser; start at 18 g, push to 20 g for the lightest lots.
Step 02
Pre-infuse low, then ramp.
Four seconds at two bar before full nine-bar extraction. Anaerobic lots reward a gentler flow profile — controlled pressure unlocks the fruit.
Step 03
Pull 1:2 to 1:3 in 25–30 seconds.
Lighter roasts open up at a 1:3 ratio (18 g in → 54 g out); medium roasts shine at 1:2 (18 g → 36 g). If it runs fast, grind finer. If it chokes, open up.
Step 01
Grind coarse.
Coarser than a V60. Fine sediment muddies the cup and dulls the fruit we spent ninety-six hours building.
Step 02
Steep four minutes.
1:16 ratio; stir once at 30 seconds; break the crust at four minutes and skim the foam.
Step 03
Press, then decant.
Press slowly. Pour every drop into a second vessel — leaving the grounds to continue extracting only dulls things.
End of story
If you want to taste what engineering sounds like — we're here.
Begin with a single bag →