This coffee is expressive. Ripe peach with a lively honey sweetness is balanced out with intensely aromatic florals of black tea and lilac.
Ethiopian Landrace
Gomma, Jimma
2,000 masl
January, 2019
Hand picked at peak ripeness. Fermented underwater for 24 hours. Dried on raised beds until moisture content reaches 10.5%.
This 100% organic selection comes to us from our exporting partners Kata Maduga. Kota is a smaller, underrepresented co-op in the Gomma woreda (district) of the Jimma region in western Ethiopia. This particular lot is harvested from trees that were planted in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and is entirely made up of coffees from extremely small smallholding partners with an average farm size of one single hectare. As is typical in Ethiopia, this coffee was fermented underwater for 24 hours, and dried in the shade for 12 days until reaching an optimal moisture content of 10.5%.
Ethiopia is widely acknowledged as where coffee originated, and its production continues to represent about 10% of the country’s gross domestic product. DNA testing has confirmed over 60 distinct 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 virtually impossible 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.