Ethiopian - Oboleyan Coffee Hambela Benti Nenka - Classic Natural Lot 2

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.

JARC Varieties and Local Landraces are generally referred to as ‘Ethiopian heirloom.’ 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. Regional landraces, meanwhile, are varieties that propagate in the wild, without regulated interventions.

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, where they are pre-cleaned and sorted before being laid out on the raised beds to dry.

The critical challenge of natural processing lies in enabling only the desired flavors to develop in order for a high level of quality to be achieved. To do this, it is necessary for the lots to include only healthy, ripe cherries. Further, the cherries must dry evenly until the target moisture level is reached in a process that takes between 10 to 12 days.

Facilitating both requires the keen attention and careful manual labor of the farmers who select and sort the cherries, and the washing station workers who monitor the moisture levels and carry out tasks like turning the cherries over at regular intervals and covering them with the appropriate material in case of unfavorable weather conditions.