Ethiopia Yirgacheffe 1 Supernatural Banko Gotiti

This coffee comes from smallholders in the Banko Gotiti area, part of the Gedeb district in southern Gedeo Zone, where some of Ethiopia’s most complex and aromatic naturals come from year after year.  Gedeb is a unique area dense with coffee growers and processors.  The coffee was processed at a central site in Banko Gotiti.  This very special process involves 24 hour fermentation.

Gedeb's Significance and Coffee Profiles

The district of Gedeb takes up the south-eastern corner of Ethiopia’s Gedeo Zone—a narrow section of plateau dense with savvy farmers whose coffee is known as “Yirgacheffe”, after the zone’s most famous district.  Gedeb, however, is a terroir, history, and community all its own that merits unique designation in our eyes.  Coffees from this community, much closer to Guji Zone than the rest of Yirgacheffe, are often the most explosive cup profiles we see from anywhere in Ethiopia.  Naturals tend to have perfume-like volatiles, and fully washed lots are often sparklingly clean and fruit candy-like in structure.

The municipality of Gedeb itself is a is a bustling outpost that links commerce between the Guji and Gedeo Zones.  It is a prolific region with an expansive network of processing stations who buy cherries from across zone borders.  These processors (and we would agree) would argue their coffee profiles are not exactly Yirgacheffe, but something of their own.  The communities surrounding Gedeb reach some of the highest growing elevations for coffee in the world and are a truly enchanting part of the long drive into Guji.  Banko Gotiti is one of the communities in eastern Gedeb and includes numerous local cooperatives, as well as independent processing stations of various types, like this one.

EDN Ethiopian Coffee 

EDN Ethiopian Coffee is an independent processor and exporter of coffee with processing sites in Guji, southern Yirgacheffe, and Sidama.  The coffee was processed at the group’s site in Banko Gotiti, one of Gedeb’s most prolific coffee producing areas.

The Banko Gotiti site employs over 200 people during harvest months to manage the continuous rotating and sorting of sundried cherry and parchment, as well as all other intake, payment, security, and inventory operations.  Being a processor for EDN is much more than transactional—they prefinance all their contributing farmers, provide educational resources, daily meals and lodging for staff.  Amenities like these are both a gesture of care and acknowledgment of the potential instability inherent to smallscale farming.  They are also strategic, since many processors in the area compete for farmer loyalty, and important for the sustainability of coffee and its workforce in the area.

Processing at Banko Gotiti

Normally, naturals at the Banko Gotiti station are hand-sorted upon delivery and moved directly to raised screen beds to sundry.  In the case of this special microlot, fresh cherries are sorted for defects and uniform ripeness and color and then placed to ferment in cold water for 24 hours.  After fermentation, coffee cherry is immediately moved to raised screen beds to dry in the sun. Drying takes 3-4 weeks depending on the local climate.  After the coffee is fully dried, it is transported to a local warehouse where it is rigorously assessed for quality and conditioned until it can be transported to Addis Ababa for final milling and export.