The Guji region of Sidamo, along the Mora Mora River in southern Ethiopia, produces “forest coffee”, or coffee trees that grow wild. The region also has numerous small coffee farms that pool their coffee in a co-op for milling and export. Guji coffee is an heirloom. What that means to us is that it is not a modern cultivar, but a traditional coffee that is unchanged from the very earliest coffees grown in this area.
We chose this lot directly at the source after extensive cupping that started back in February.
This is the second year we have been buying Nensebo, and we are astonished every time we taste it!
This lot has been processed at the Ch'Ire Ameli washing station in the Nensebo woreda, Guji terroir. More than 700 smallholder farmers bring their cherries to Ch'Ire Ameli, who then made an impressive selection and an outstanding natural process using the traditional raised beds.
The FERMENTATION PROCESS
The dry process seems simple: pick the fruit, lay it out in the sun until it turns from red to brown to near-black, and then pull off off the thick, dried outer layer in one step to reveal the green bean. It is a method suited to arid regions, where the sun and heat can dry the seed inside the intact fruit skin.
It's often referred to as "natural coffee" because of its simplicity, and because the fruit remains intact and undisturbed, a bit like drying grapes into raisins. Since it requires minimal investment, the dry process method is a default to create cheap commodity-grade coffee in areas that have the right climate capable of drying the fruit and seed.
But it’s a fail in humid or wet regions. If the drying isn't progressing fast enough, the fruit degrades, rots or molds.
Dry-processed coffees can also be wildly inconsistent. If you want a cleanly-fruited, sweet, intense cup, dry process (DP) takes more hand labor than the wet process. Even the most careful pickers will take green unripe or semi-ripe coffee off the branch as they pick red, ripe cherry. If these are not removed in the first days of drying, the green turns to brown that is hard to distinguish from the ripe fruit.
Ethiopian Heirloom, why the generic name? It's estimated that there are somewhere in-between six and ten thousand coffee varietals in Ethiopia. And due to this colossal figure, there hasn’t been the genetic testing to allow buyers to distinguish the varietal. With the cross-pollination that naturally happens in the wild, the name ‘Ethiopian Heirloom’ exists as a catch-all phrase to describe this happenstance. However, that really makes Ethiopian quite a mystery – and an interesting mystery with that as each village or town could potentially have a different varietal which could carry very unique properties.
Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, meaning it was only naturally found here!
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