Banko Chelchele is part of the greater Gedeb district, which is known for its gifted processing climate and exquisite naturals. This is a light and clean natural process with a syrupy body, layers of stone fruit, and aromatic florals. Gedeb and its Coffee
Gedeb and Its Coffee
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.
Gedeb is a remote but impressively industrious area for coffee production. Half of its territory is planted with coffee. Until recently coffee exports were allowed only limited channels and the vast majority of coffee grown in this area was sold by the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU), consolidated under the wide-reaching Worka Cooperative, or sold anonymously through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX). Today, however, in addition to the Worka Cooperative splitting into multiple smaller coops, there are increasing numbers of single farm owners and independent companies who are processing and exporting direct. It is an exciting time to be buying in Gedeb, where we expect to see new layers of coffee continuously unfold as its local industry accelerates.
The city of Gedeb itself is a is a bustling outpost that links commerce between the Guji and Gedeo Zones, with an expansive network of processing stations who buy cherry 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 Chelchele is one of the communities East of Gedeb and includes cooperative members that are cooperative-affiliated, as well independent washing stations of various types, many of which, like this one, are simply named “Banko Chelchele” after the community itself.
Banko Chelchele Station and Processing
The Banko Chelchele washing stati are owned and operated by independent exporters. A few hundred individual smallholders contribute to Banko Chelchele, each averaging 1.6 hectares of coffee which typically shares the land with 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.
Natural coffee across Gedeb is processed simply and with great attention to detail: fresh-picked cherry is delivered each day by contributing farmers and hand-sorted upon arrival for uniformity and ripeness. Once sorting is complete, cherry is weighed and logged, and moved directly to raised beds to dry, a process that typically takes 3 weeks. During the drying period the coffee is constantly rotated during the day and covered at night to prevent the area’s humidity from settling on the cherry’s skin. Fully dried cherry pods are then stored for multiple weeks to stabilize moisture content and water activity, then hulled locally and transported to Addis Ababa for final milling and export.
