Ethiopia Yirgacheffe 1 Natural Banko Gotiti

Regional Details:

Banko Gotiti processing station is located in the coveted Gedeb district, the southernmost district of Ethiopia’s famous Gedeo zone. Nearly all Gedeb is known for its gifted processing climate and experienced growers.  Gedeo is frequently referred to as “Yirgacheffe”, after the zone’s most famous central district.  Gedeb, however, is a terroir, history, and community all its own that merits unique designation in our eyes.  Coffees from this district, much closer to Guji zone than the rest of Gedeo, are often the most explosive cup profiles we see from anywhere in Ethiopia.  The Gedeb district is a remote but impressively industrious area for coffee production. Half of its territory is planted with coffee.  The city of Gedeb itself is a bustling outpost that links commerce between the Guji and Gedeo zone, with an expansive network of processing stations that buy cherry from across zone borders.  The communities surrounding Gedeb reach some of the highest growing elevations for coffee in the world and are a truly enchanting part of the landscape.

Sourcing Details:

Historically, most of the coffee grown in this area was either processed and exported by the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU), consolidated under the wide-reaching Worka Cooperative, or sold anonymously through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX).  Now there are new channels because the Worka Cooperative has split into multiple smaller cooperatives and Ethiopia’s export rules have opened new opportunities to an increasing number of single farm owners and independent companies processing and exporting directly.

Gotiti Station:

Smallholder farmers contribute cherries to the station, each averaging about 3.5 hectares of coffee.  Most of them also produce enset—a fruit-less relative of the banana tree whose pulp is scraped and packed into cakes, fermented underground, and then toasted as kocho, a staple starch in the area.  The natural processed coffees are sorted by hand on arrival, then taken to raised beds to fully dry, a process that takes between 3 to 4 weeks.  Finished dried cherry pods are stored locally to rest and allow internal moisture to equilibrate, and then de-husked.  The green coffee is trucked to Addis Ababa for additional sorting and preparation for export.