Lot 25.01

Our beautiful anaerobic natural from Sidama.

This is our third year using the anaerobic processing method at Taferi Kela – the first year was all about trying our best and learning a lot, but this year we’ve achieved a coffee of outstanding quality! This lot has all the funkiness and tropical fruit notes you could desire.

We are so proud of our anaerobic processing team who are fully dedicated to structure and discipline, despite many being considered “disabled” by Ethiopian society. Led by Hester, Dawit, and Sissay, a war veteran and cranial gunshot survivor, the team processes each lot with a controlled approach that brings out the absolute best of the cherry. Their dedication and perseverance created these 15 perfect bags.

When we delivered our farm produce to our Bette Buna wet-mill, the cherries were placed on African raised beds and hand sorted by our team as a way of “pre-cleaning”; out under or overripe cherries and any leaves or sticks. After separating out the ripe cherries, they were ready to process!

Anaerobic natural

This lot was processed anaerobically to create a super intense, forest-fruity cup profile. We fermented the cherries in blue barrels, each fitted with a lid with a one-way valve. This allowed us to create an anaerobic environment (an environment without oxygen) where fermentation could start. We did not add any additional yeasts or starters, but processed the cherries as a pure anaerobic natural to show the undiluted potential of our cherries.

After fermentation reaches the correct parameters, we spread the cherries in thin layers on our African raised beds and let the sun dry the cherries to the right moisture level. The raised beds allow a crucial amount of air to circulate, ensuring the equal drying of each cherry. This drying process takes about 20-25 days, depending on the strength of the sun and outside temperatures.

Improving complexity

Once the correct moisture level was reached, the dry cherries were bagged, tagged and moved to our store. There we allow natural lots to rest for a minimum of 8 weeks to improve the complexity and intensity of each cup profile.

After dry milling locally to remove the hulls, we applied another round of hand sorting by our milling team to remove any primary defects. After that, the bags of green coffee were loaded on a truck to take a 3-5 day drive to our main dry mill in Gelan, located close to Addis Ababa. Here the green beans underwent another round of cleaning, screening on size and density, and color sorting, and were bagged a final time, ready to be exported!

Farm

Our farm is located around the village of Taferi Kela, a remote and isolated community in the woreda D’ara, far to the south of Sidama.

Although Taferi Kela is facing several economic and social challenges, this coffee district has all of the conditions necessary to produce exceptional coffee: high altitude, ideal climate, rich fertile soil, healthy plant life, and most importantly, strong community. 

Season 24/25

This year’s harvest started with several challenges in Taferi Kela. One of the biggest challenges was a round of hail storms in the months leading up to harvest, both at our farms and at the plots of our community farmers. Although it doesn’t usually affect cup profile or score, hail can potentially lead to some beauty damage on the green coffee and is always a stressful event.

Another challenge was also due to climate change – normally the picking starts in mid-November, but this year the cherries were ripe in October thanks to the unusual weather, so we had to pick our fresh cherries much earlier than we planned.

Read more about our farm and community in Taferi Kela.

We are honored to work with local chiefs, community leaders, and smallholder farmers to grow and source our spectacular Bette Buna coffees. At our farms in Taferi Kela Sidamo and Guji Megadu we work closely with our family and neighbours to grow seedlings, rewild coffee forests, and train farmers in methods of growing and processing that create opportunities for everyone in our community.