ROAST LEVEL: LIGHT

TASTING NOTES: PEACH-MANDARIN ORANGE-LEMON-BRIGHT

GROWER: Smallholder farmers organized around Habtamu Getu’s processing station

REGION: Reku municipality, Gedeb district, Gedeo Zone, Southern Nations, Nationalities and People’s Region, Ethiopia

PROCESS: Washed

VARIETY: Local indigenous landraces and heirloom cultivars

ALTITUDE: 2000 - 2100 Meters

SOIL: Vertisol

The district of Gedeb takes up the south-eastern corner of Ethiopia’s Gedeo Zone—a narrow section of plateau dense with savvy farmers whose coffee is known as “Yirgacheffe”, after the zone’s most famous district. Gedeb, however, is a terroir, history, and community all its own that merits unique designation in our eyes. Coffees from this community, much closer to Guji Zone than the rest of Yirgacheffe, are often the most explosive cup profiles we see from anywhere in Ethiopia.

The Banko Gotiti washing station is located in Reku, a sub-area of Banko Gotiti, and is overseen by Habtamu Getu, who manages cherry supply and processing operations for Siz Agro. The site receives cherry from a few hundred individual smallholders, each averaging 1-2 hectares apiece of farmland. On these farms coffee typically shares the land with enset—a fruit-less relative of the banana tree whose pulp is scraped and packed into cakes, fermented underground, and then toasted as kocho, a staple starch in the area.