This is one of the very best Ethiopian coffees we have ever tried. It demonstrates almost perfectly the profile expected from washed coffees of the Yirgacheffe region with sweet aromas of apricot paired with floral notes creating an almost tea like character. Being the birthplace of coffee, this sort of complexity is to be expected and is certainly what we search for every year when we make our selections.

This beautiful lot comes to us from the Boji washing station which is situated in the village of Ch’elelek’tu around 25km from the town of Yirgacheffe in the Kochere woreda of the SNNPR (Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region). There are around 500 smallholder farmers that deliver their freshly picked ripe cherries to this washing station where it is sorted through before being depulped to ensure any under/over ripe cherries are removed and separated. The coffee is then fermented for between 8-12 hours allowing the mucilage to break down – once fermentation is complete, the sticky beans are then washed in channels and moved around by a team of workers armed with wooden paddles to remove any of the flesh that still remains around the parchment layer.

Once the washing process is complete, the beans are then dried on raised beds for around 14 days before being transported to the dry mill in Addis Ababa to be processed for export. This is really the first year that we have been able to achieve this level of traceability with our Ethiopian coffee thanks to a change in law that now means producers are able to sell their coffee directly to the buyer rather than to the ECX (Ethiopia Commodity Exchange) where it would have previously been assessed and allocated to a specific region and grade making it impossible to know which washing station had contributed to the lot. Now, producers are able to sell at higher prices direct to buyers meaning they are rewarded better for the quality of coffee produced.