Ethiopia Farmgate COE National Select Jury West Arsi 1 Natural Seid Adem Boruu – 29928 – GrainPro Bags – SPOT RCWHSE

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Flavor Profile Grapefruit, dried apricot, jasmine, creamy, sweet

Please Note This coffee landed more than 8 months ago.

Check out our Guide to Ethiopian Coffee Grades

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About this coffee

Grower

Seid Adem Boruu

Altitude

1800-2300 masl

Variety

Regional cultivar 74112

Soil

Vertisol

Region

Nansabo district, West Arsi zone, Oromia Region, Ethiopia

Process

Full natural and dried on raised beds

Harvest

November - January

Certification

Conventional

Coffee Background

West Arsi zone wraps around the northern border of Sidama, and while countless coffee buyers have traversed it on their way to Sidama and Yirgacheffe, it remains obscure to many of them as a producing area of any note. Border regions like these that are just outside of more famous coffee terroirs are often sold as their neighbor—a tradition not at all uncommon in the coffee world and which in Ethiopia used to affect not only West Arsi but also Guji, Illubabor, and Gelana Abaya, all of which were commonly sold under other names prior to developing their own reputation. West Arsi is mostly arid and transitional terrain that slopes from Ethiopia’s Rift Valley to the highland forest plateau of Sidama and Gedeo zones. Being Ethiopia, there are of course pockets of high-quality coffee to be found, naturals in particular.
Seid Adem Boruu’s coffee was a national jury selection at this year’s Cup of Excellence (COE) competition. Seid is a very young farmer by East Africa averages, only 28 years old but already with 4 children of his own. Seid has worked with coffee since he was 13 years old and is a second-generation farmer, having grown up on his parents’ farm. Seid’s property is less than a single hectare—roughly average for the region, but also impressively high-quality and productive considering he produced 13-bags of award-winning coffee on his own. This natural process microlot was handpicked and dried on raised beds on Seid’s own property, carefully supervised and sorted specifically for the COE competition.
The world’s first Cup of Excellence competition took place in Brazil in 1999 and quickly became known as the world’s best discovery mechanism for quality. Each competition is origin-specific and involves multiple national selection rounds, a final competition with an international judging panel, and an online auction for the top 30 high-scoring submissions. All submissions are cupped blind throughout the entire competition, leaving judges only the cup quality to assess, and each submission is cupped up to five times. Winning producers are often fabulously rewarded with record-setting prices for their coffee, not to mention lifelong status for such an achievement. The competition has revealed countless innovative processing styles, rare cultivars, and obscure producing areas to the rest of the world for the first time.
Ethiopia is of course well-known for having an incredibly high status quo for quality. Ironically, due to lack of sponsorship and an established single-farmer marketplace, the COE has only been held here twice. Royal has been a longtime supporter of maximum traceability in Ethiopia via whatever tools are available. This year we are buying and importing the entire national selection round ourselves—that is, all 22 top-scoring submissions that did not go to international auction. The enthusiasm of Ethiopia’s gifted smallholders means there are a lot of excellent coffees to be appreciated beyond the competition’s top 30 that go to auction. In the COE format small growers typically submit fully processed and dried but un-milled lots of coffee, which are then centrally milled and stored during the auction’s multi-week procession. All national jury selects were purchased by Royal with a flat farmgate price of $4.50 per pound of green coffee directly to the farmers.