About the varietal
This coffee is mostly made up of local landrace varieties Kurume and Wolisho. Sidama is home to many landrace varieties that were originally selected from the forest and have been propagated successfully for decades. There are five popular varieties that are named after indigenous trees in the area— Bedessa, Kurume, Mique, Sawe and Wolisho.
There is little documentation on the history of these varieties, and it is hard to know if they represent a single plant or a wider group of varieties; however, it is widely accepted that they play a major role in the quality and floral flavour profile of the coffee from this region.
Processing
This coffee has been processed following the washed method, using fresh, clean water. It is classified as Grade 1, the highest quality classification for Ethiopian coffees, indicating a great deal of effort has been put into the selecting and grading during processing.
Each day, carefully hand-picked coffee cherries are delivered to the Hadeso washing station and are meticulously sorted by hand and in a floatation tank prior to processing to remove unripe, overripe, or damaged fruit, in order to enhance the quality and sweetness of the cup.
After sorting, the coffee cherries are then pulped to remove the fruit and skin and graded by weight; heavier beans are of superior quality and deliver a sweeter cup. After grading, the parchment-covered coffee is soaked in tanks of clean water for 36–48 hours to remove the mucilage (sticky fruit pulp) by allowing it to ferment and detach from the coffee.
The coffee is then re-washed and graded again by density in washing channels and soaked in clean water for 12 hours. While doing this, mill workers keep a close eye on the clarity of the water being used (and replace it with fresh water as necessary), and check the parchment manually to feel how much mucilage is left on the seeds. As the texture of the washed seeds changes, and millworkers notice slightly more traction, parchment is just about ready to be dried.