This is a lovely classically southern Ethiopian profile that sings. In the cup we find ripe nectarine, bergamot, and sweet black tea.
Ethiopian Landrace
Gedeb
2,200 masl
January, 2021
Hand picked at peak ripeness. Floated to further remove defects and depulped on the day of harvest. Wet fermented for 48 hours. Dried on raised beds for 20 days until moisture content reaches approximately 10%.
Heleanna Georgalis has been an integral part of our work in Ethiopia. She continues to exceed expectations in procuring some of the finest, highest scoring Ethiopian coffees we see each year. This is our first year working with the Gedeb washing station, however, when we were tasting through offer samples this coffee screamed. Southern Ethiopia has become legendary for its quality and growing conditions for coffee, and produces some of the finest coffees in the world year after year. This is an ode to the classical profile that quite literally put southern Ethiopia on the specialty coffee map.
Ethiopia is widely acknowledged as where coffee originated, and its production continues to represent about 10% of the country’s gross domestic product. Estimates guess that there are potentially up to thousands of varieties growing in Ethiopia, making it home to the most coffee biodiversity of any region in the world. Given the tradition of coffee production in Ethiopia and the political interworkings of the Ethiopian coffee trade, it is extremely difficult to get single variety coffee lots from Ethiopia. This is changing, albeit very slowly. Most Ethiopian coffees are blends of the many Ethiopian varieties, and referred to simply as 'Ethiopian Landrace'.
The cost of getting a coffee from cherry to beverage varies enormously depending on its place of origin and the location of its consumption. The inclusion of price transparency is a starting point to inform broader conversation around the true costs of production and the sustainability of specialty coffee as a whole.