ETHIOPIA BOOKKISA

Recommended Retail Price: £12.50/250g

Region: Bookkisa, Guji
Altitude: 2,000 - 2,150 m.a.s.l.
Variety: Gibirinna 74110, Serto 74112
Process: Natural

Tasting Notes: Rich yet elegant, this is a classic natural coffee from the Guji region. Luscious notes of forest fruit compote followed quickly by cacao nibs and lavender florals. Extremely well balanced and satisfying.

An excellent Ethiopian lot is a must-have for any specialty coffee lineup. Simple and satisfying, this coffee has the trademark jammy acidity of a natural processed coffee from the Guji region. Longtime Steampunkians will be reminded of the natural Bale Mountain we roasted for several seasons a few years ago. This is the coffee for a relaxing weekend when you have time to enjoy. 

This coffee was grown by smallholder farmers in the Bookkisa municipality in southern Ethiopia. It’s what’s known as “garden coffee”, grown by people who also cultivate other food crops for sale or personal consumption on small plots near their homes. Although there are larger plantations in Ethiopia and coffee also grows wild in forests there, the bulk of Ethiopian coffee is grown like this one, by smallholders.

After harvesting their coffee the growers who produced this lot delivered their cherry to Sookoo Coffee, a drying station owned by Ture Waji in the hillside town of Shakiso. Founded in 2018 by Ture and his brother Assefa, Sookoo gets deliveries of cherry from roughly 100 growers in the surrounding areas. They keep the lots from different areas separate to retain the unique characteristics of each one. At the Sookoo station the coffee dries in thin layers  that are regularly turned for between 15 to 20 days to achieve the desired moisture content for stable storage and transport.

The varieties that make up this lot, Gibirinna 74110 and Serto 74112, are probably not familiar names to most coffee consumers. Indeed, writing this was the first time Rachel, our roaster, had come across them. Historically, most of the coffee grown in Ethiopia has been bundled together under the label “Heirloom” variety. In a country where coffee grows wild, classification and controlled breeding can be challenging. The physical characteristics of a coffee plant don’t always lead to accurate taxonomy. 

But, since 1968 the Jimma Agricultural Research Center (JARC) has been working to isolate wild varieties, classify them and breed disease resistant cultivars for Ethiopian farmers. JARC has released 42 coffee varieties for different regions, including the two in this lot. They were developed from the Metu Bishari selections from the forest of the same name in the southwest of the country on the border with Sudan. JARC selected them in 1974 (hence the 74 at the start of their catalogue name) for their resistance to Coffee Berry Disease and today they are some of the most common varieties grown in Ethiopia. For more on Ethiopian coffee varieties check out this video.

About Osito

This is the fist lot of coffee we’ve bought from Osito importers (osito means little bear in Spanish), which was established in 2015 with a partnership between an American former roaster, Kyle Bellinger and a Colombian producer, Jose Jadir Losada. Since then Osito has expanded and now, in addition to importing coffee to the US and Europe from Colombia, they also work in Ethiopia, Brazil, Mexico and Burundi. They emphasise supply chain sustainability using fixed-price, multigrade contacts with growers. This means that they aim to buy the entirety of a grower’s crop at an agreed upon price. In this way, as well as with their latest project La Cueva Del Oso, they’re building new models for the production and trade of coffee. It’s exciting to be buying from a company that is working to find ways to make the industry more equitable for producers.