ETHIOPIA GEDEB 3 NATURAL ORGANIC HALO BARITI GRAINPRO

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About this coffee

Grower

300 smallholder farmers organized around the Halo Bariti cooperative

Altitude

1600 – 2300 masl

Variety

Regional landraces and heirloom cultivars

Soil

Vertisol

Region

Halo Bariti community, Gedeb district, Gedeo Zone, Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region

Process

Full natural and dried on raised beds

Harvest

January - February

Certification

Organic

Coffee Background

Halo Bariti is one of the best-known communities in Yirgacheffe for outstanding, iconic naturals. This lot comes from a small cooperative that is part of the Yirgacheffe Union, the region’s oldest, largest, and strongest farmer network. We all agree that Gedeb, the district where Halo Bariti is located, is an entire terroir unto itself, with coffees unlike anywhere else in Ethiopia. 

Coffee Today in Southern Yirgacheffe 

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 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. Halo Bariti is a municipality just east of Gedeb and includes cooperative-affiliated farmers, as well as a raft of independent processing stations seeking to capitalize on the region’s gifted coffee-growing conditions.  

Halo Bariti Cooperative 

Halo Bariti is one of the primary cooperatives that together make up the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU). The Union, first established In 2002, has more than 45,000 individual farmer members and 28 different cooperatives across the Gedeo Zone, almost all of which are Fair Trade certified. (Gedeo, while tiny compared to neighboring Sidama and Guji zones, is one of Ethiopia’s most densely populated areas after Addis Ababa.) The members of each primary cooperative elect their own executive committee which makes decisions about investments like new equipment and tree maintenance, but also creates plans for member social services, school support, public health, infrastructure, and how to structure payments to the coop members. YCFCU also appoints professional managers for each primary cooperative to oversee harvest and processing procedures, who are accountable to the members and the executive committee.  

Halo Bariti’s members average less than 2 hectares apiece. These are quintessential Gedeo family farms: small and forested, whose production is often divided between spacious, lofty coffee trees and enset, a fruitless relative of the banana plant whose pulp is scraped, packed into cakes, fermented underground, and then toasted as a staple starch. This common pair of crops satisfies unique and separate needs: coffee for economic livelihood; and enset for nutrition.  

Processing 

Naturals at Halo Bariti are received direct from participating farms daily throughout harvest, sorted for consistency and quality, and then taken directly to raised beds to dry for 2-3 weeks during which they are constantly rotated, and covered each evening. 

Fully dried coffee is rested for one month on cooperative property, and then transported to the Union’s storage facility and dry mill for de-hulling and transit to Addis Ababa.