Ethiopia - Yirgacheffe Banko Chelbesa

After years of studying and working in the UK and the US, 2018 saw Michael Tseyahe co-found EDN Ethiopia Coffee, a coffee-producing and exporting company with five processing sites, also known as washing stations, in Ethiopia. They started the company with a noble sense of responsibility to contribute to nation-building by directly participating in advancing the country’s agricultural agenda, being its predominant source of both national income and pride.

In so doing, EDN is among the enablers of bettering coffee-growing families’ welfare while helping introduce improvements and innovations to traditional know-how, thereby supporting efforts to perpetuate the country’s intangible heritage in coffee. Quality-focused and customer-oriented, the company has invested in nurturing its ties with peer producers and the smallholder farmers within their scope, skill-building within their teams, as well as building out the appropriate infrastructure to meet the requirements of its global customers. As such, they have been gaining renown for their professionalism and reliability as a provider of higher-end specialty coffees in small and difficult-to-acquire batches amid an increasingly challenging milieu.

Washed, natural, honey, and anaerobic post-harvest processing methods are implemented across EDN’s processing sites located in two of only three eminent coffee-growing administrative regions recognized at the Ethiopian Cup of Excellence from 2021 to 2022, both in the south. First is SNNPR (i.e. the Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples' Region), where the neighboring Yirgacheffe and Gedeb districts within the Gedeo zone are located. Second is the Oromia Region, where the Hambela district within the Guji zone is.

Faced with the predicament of inadequate personal resources — as do the majority of smallholders in the country — Chelbesa Village coffee farming families are empowered by producers like EDN Coffee toward realizing greater returns for their hard work, by sustainably improving and maintaining the quality of their coffees.

Wolisho, Dega, and Kurume are varieties native to the Gedeo zone that reportedly originated from Yirgacheffe. Being indigenous to this locale, they are better adapted to its terroir and, as such, are believed to express the complex fruit and floral nuances of Ethiopian coffees are renowned for to a heightened degree, compared to varieties introduced from other areas.

Following traditional practices, Chelbesa Village 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, 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 EDN’s Yirgacheffe Gedeb processing center, 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 activities like turning the cherries over at regular intervals and covering them with the appropriate material in case of unfavorable weather conditions.

In this lot, the natural process gave way to tropical sweetness with gently crisp and tangy fruit highlights, tempered by soft berry acidity.