Ethiopia - Oboleyan Coffee Hambela Dimtu Haro Highborn Project - Natural Anaerobic

In 2018, reforms to Ethiopia’s coffee trade created new opportunities for private citizens to participate in the industry. Tariku Edema and his brothers, Wendimu, Demelash, and Anteneh, saw this as an opportunity to build something meaningful, founding Oboleyan Coffee to help improve the lives of coffee-growing families.

Family remains at the heart of the company. Named after the Oromo word for “brother,” Oboleyan reflects the bond between its four founders, whose decades of experience span coffee exportation, post-harvest processing, and warehouse management.

Today, that knowledge guides Oboleyan Coffee’s work in the Guji Zone of Oromia, one of Ethiopia’s most celebrated coffee-growing regions. Through their washing stations, the brothers receive harvests from neighboring farmers and process them with careful attention to quality and the preferences of the global specialty coffee community.

74110, 74112, and 74158 are JARC varieties whose combined flavor potential we have grown familiar with in our years of sourcing coffees from Ethiopia, although ‘Ethiopian heirloom’ is the general term commonly used to identify coffee originating from Ethiopia. JARC varieties were developed and released to improve the productivity and livelihood of smallholder coffee farmers and boost the country's coffee industry. They are promoted and bred because of their good quality when grown at the recommended elevations, resistance to or tolerance of adverse elements, and adaptability to diverse environments. There are 40+ JARC varieties comprised mostly of pure line selections and a handful of hybrids.

Following traditional practices, smallholder farmers cultivate several varieties in small plots of land without artificial inputs, making the coffees organic by default. Many of them depend on the natural proliferation of the coffee plants, which grow into trees close to each other, which in some cases can inhibit the identification of the individual coffee varieties at the time of harvest.

At harvest season, the head of household designates the trees which are ripe for picking — the ones with deep red cherries — and it is conventionally women who are recognized to have the acumen for it who lead in this task. Throughout, they take care not to strip the trees of leaves or harm any of the branches. The cherries are then brought to Oboleyan Coffee’s washing station.

The properly ripe cherries are carefully hand-picked by the farmers and delivered to the processing site, where flotation is done to spot and remove overripe, underripe, and damaged cherries. A further visual assessment is done to ensure only the cherries at optimum ripeness proceed to the anaerobic fermentation phase, which ensues in pressurized and oxygen-free containers.

Throughout fermentation, there is strict monitoring and control to ensure the necessary sugar content, temperature, and pressure levels are met and maintained, and oxygen is consistently absent, to achieve the desired cup profile.

After 10 to 12 days in the anaerobic fermentation phase, the cherries are transferred from the fermentation tanks to the shaded drying beds, which had been designed both to allow for proper air circulation and prevent exposure to the sun. Throughout the drying phase, which could last from 15 to 20 days until the target moisture level of 11% is reached, the cherries are periodically churned to achieve the required degree of fermentation.