This coffee comes to us through Joel Edwards and the team at Red Fox Coffee Merchants, sourced from Ethiopia's Guji zone. As with our other recent Ethiopia offering, Red Fox's own notes on this one were thin, so most of what follows comes from what's publicly known about the washing station itself.
The coffee is processed at the Banko Michicha washing station, established in 2011 in the kebele of the same name, within the Kercha woreda of Guji. Today the site holds 108 raised drying beds and draws cherry from roughly 782 local growers spread across three surrounding kebeles: Banko Michicha, Banko Baya, and Suka Chega. Farmers cultivate landrace varieties on small plots and deliver harvest to eight collection centers that feed into the station, a scale of coordination that's easy to overlook until you consider how many individual hands actually touch this lot before it ever reaches a roaster.
The processing itself is where this coffee gets interesting. Rather than a traditional natural, this lot underwent extended cherry fermentation inside vacuum-sealed stainless steel tanks fitted with a fermentation valve to vent off CO2, a controlled, yeast-assisted approach that pushes well past standard sundried practice. It's the kind of technical processing choice that shows up clearly in the cup.
The variety here is landrace, largely Kurume, Wolisho, and Dega, grown between roughly 1,900 and 2,150 meters above sea level. As with much of Ethiopia's coffee, these are the product of generations of intermingled cultivation rather than a single named cultivar, and the diversity shows.
The cup is vivid and a little indulgent. Blueberry opens things up front, juicy and unmistakable. Jasmine lifts the middle with a delicate, perfumed sweetness. Chocolate ice cream carries the finish, rich and creamy in a way that feels almost dessert-like by the time the cup cools.
We're grateful to Joel and the Red Fox team for bringing this one our way, and to the growers of Banko Michicha for the work that made it possible.
Profile
- Roast: Light
- Region: Banko Michicha, Kercha, Guji, Ethiopia
- Farm: Banko Michicha Washing Station (Various Smallholders)
- Process: Natural (Yeast-Assisted Controlled Fermentation)
- Elevation: 1,900–2,150 MASL
- Variety: Ethiopian Landrace (Kurume, Wolisho, Dega)
- Cup: Blueberry, Jasmine, Chocolate Ice Cream
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Ethiopia –– Yirgacheffe Chelbessa