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This is a Grade 2 washed coffee from the Guji region of Ethiopia, composed from cherry from about 450 smallholder famers outside the town of Shakiso, growing traditional Ethiopian heirloom varieties at elevations ranging from 1800 to 2100 masl (meters above sea level). Washed process coffees from the Wersi washing station are depulped within hours after harvesting before undergoing tank fermentation for 36-48 hours. After the mucilage has broken down, coffees are carefully washed with fresh water and dried on raised beds under parabolic shade nets for 5-7 days.
History Lesson
Coffee is ancient in Ethiopia, but coffee farming is not. By the end of the 9th Century coffee was actively being cultivated in Ethiopia as food, but probably not as a beverage. It was the Arab world that developed brewing. Even as coffee became an export for Ethiopia in the late 1800’s, Ethiopian coffee was the result of gathering rather than agricultural practices. A hundred years ago, plantations, mostly in Harar, were still the exception, while “Kaffa” coffee from the southwest was still harvested wild. In 1935, William Ukers wrote: “Wild coffee is also known as Kaffa coffee, from one of the districts where it grows most abundantly in a state of nature. The trees grow in such profusion that the possible supply, at a minimum of labor in gathering, is practically unlimited. It is said that in south-western Abyssinia there are immense forests of it that have never been encroached upon except at the outskirts.”
