Ethiopia Yirgacheffe 4 Natural Gelana Abaya - 32049-1 - SPOT DUPUYHOU

Gelena Abaya is a unique border region where Ethiopia's Gedeo and Oromia zones meet and where processors receive cherry from both regions. Naturals from here are softly sweet with dried and cooked fruit nuance.

Gelana Abaya – honorary “Yirgacheffe”

The district of Abaya runs along the western limit of Gedeo Zone, the narrow southern region teeming with dense farming communities and hyper-competitive processors known as “Yirgacheffe”. Abaya district, while technically outside of Gedeo Zone and a part of the Oromia region, does have a few corners that cross the border into Gedeo. Because of this, and because of its characteristic “Yirgacheffe” cup profile (to be expected considering a lot of the cherry is coming from various Gedeo communities), Gelana Abaya is long accepted as a peer to Gedeo zone's central areas, including Yirgacheffe, Hafursa, Konga, Chelelektu, and others.

Gelana Abaya Processing Station

The Gelana Abaya processing station that produced this coffee is an independent business, not affiliated with any of Yirgacheffe's union cooperatives. The station was established in 2006 and has more than 700 farmers contributing cherry.

Gelana Abaya station services local farmers with 1-2 hectares of land on average, which tends to be devoted to coffee, cabbage, and enset, a fruitless relative of the banana tree whose inner pulp is scraped, packed into large parcels and fermented underground, and then consumed sliced and toasted as a staple starch. During harvest time 200-250 employees are on site to manage intake, processing, financial operations and security of the station.

Naturals at Gelana Abaya are received from farmers as freshly-picked cherry. On intake, cherry is sorted for defects and uniform ripeness, and then moved directly to raised beds to dry in the sun, where they are continuously raked to ensure even, slow drying. Drying cherry is covered with tarpaulins during the midday hours, when the sun at this elevation is searingly hot, as well as overnight, to protect cherries from settling humidity. Total drying time is 2-3 weeks, after which the finished pods are transported to Dili for hulling, and then Addis Ababa for final dry milling and export.