Ethiopia Dry Process Guji Gerba

Tasting Notes

Gerba is a real powerhouse in the fruit-flavor department, promising a bouquet of berry and other fruit-floral highlights at the lighter end of our recommended roast range that give off a complex aromatic quality in the cup. It's a coffee you want to sip and sit with in order to take in the wide range of fruit flavors. The cup displays a really wild aromatic profile from the outset, with a flowery overlay that brings out a sort of ripeness in the fruit flavors. Notes of blueberry, ripe strawberry, yellow cherry, and aromatic rue come through, shadowed by a softer cocoa hint that adds a rustic hint to the profile. I found the acidity to be well-integrated into the cup flavors, supportive, but in no way intrusive.

Origin Details
This dry processed coffee comes from a privately run coffee site in Gerba town, Western Guji Zone. This is one of a hand full of sites operated by Abiyot Agaze, who over the past couple of years has supplied us with some of the highest scoring naturals, including Buno Dambi Uddo earlier in 2022. Elevation at the farms they buy cherry from range from 1900 to 2300 meters above sea level. Each lot they produce is made up of coffee from a few hundred different farmers in the region, most with only a few hundred coffee trees or less. You tend to see coffee intercropped with other fruits and vegetables, "false banana" being one the more common food staples to see planted in the region. The false banana plant has many uses, and is widely utilized for its starchy inners that are often fermented with yeast to make a bread ("kocho"), and the leaves can be transformed into roofs for houses, baskets, and more. Dry processing is the oldest coffee processing method still used, and involves drying the coffee bean and cherry whole. From pictures you see, you might think you can just dump the cherries to the beds and wait. This is not the case, and the best lots take a lot of preparation! The coffee has to be spread out to a layer depth of only a few centimeters, no more, in order to allow air flow and left to dry for 3-4 weeks. The coffee is turned hourly, or even more frequently, in order to facilitate even drying and keep the coffee from molding. It's not difficult, but requires constant attention. Workers continually pull out lower quality coffee in the form of physical defects and coffee that was not harvested at peak ripeness in order to cultivate Grade 1 quality.

Origin: Ethiopia

Region: Guji Gerba

Producer: Heirloom Cultivators 

Processing: Dry Process

Altitude: 1900-2300 meters