Ethiopia Yirgacheffe 1 Natural 120 Hour Anaerobic Koke – 30841 – GrainPro Bags – SPOT SHANGHAI

Coffee Background

Koke is a community in the small and densely-populated greater Gedeo zone, whose iconic floral and citrus-heavy coffees require almost no introduction. This lot was created by Tracon Trading, an independent exporter with select processing sites throughout the zone. This is a natural process with a long anaerobic fermentation step in cherry prior to drying that gives the acidity a boost and the fruit flavors additional snappy clarity in the cup. 

Yirgacheffe and its Coffee 

Koke is located in the Yirgacheffe district, near the center of the coveted Gedeo Zone—the narrow section of highland plateau dense with savvy farmers and fiercely competitive processors whose coffee is known the world over as “Yirgacheffe”, thanks to the district’s outsize repuation in the specialty market. The Gedeo Zone is named for the Gedeo people who are indigenous to this area. As a coffee terroir, Gedeo, or “Yirgacheffe”, has for decades been considered a benchmark for beauty and complexity in arabica coffee. It’s known for being beguilingly ornate and jasmine-like when fully washed, and seductively punchy and sweet when sundried, and hardly requires an introduction. Many roasters would count Gedeo, or “Yirgacheffe”, as one of the terroirs that lured them into a lifetime of coffee admiration. 

Tracon Trading and Processing 

The Koke processing station is owned and operated by Tracon Coffee, an independent exporter who manages 6 stations total in the Yirgacheffe district. A few hundred individual smallholders contribute to Koke, 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.  

Normally, naturals at Koke are processed simply by hand-sorting cherry deliveries from small farmers and immediately putting the coffee on raised beds to dry. In this case, however, after hand sorting the cherry is sealed into oxygen-free tanks and allowed to slowly ferment for 120 hours, a process that allows sugars to peak and the resulting acidity to pick up some additional tanginess as the fruit breaks down. Once the fermentation step is complete, the whole cherries are removed and laid on raised beds to dry, a process that takes 2-3 weeks to complete.  

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.