Regional Details:
Konga is part of Yirgacheffe, one of 8 woredas, or districts, that together comprise the dense and competitive highland zone of Gedeo. The entire Gedeo zone is in fact often referred to as “Yirgacheffe” thanks to the notoriety of this particular district. Konga is centrally located among Yirgacheffe producers, being just a few kilometers south of the town of Yirga Chefe itself—a surprisingly small community given its mythical stature as one of the world’s most gifted coffee landscapes. As a coffee terroir, this part of Gedeo has for decades been considered a benchmark for beauty and complexity in arabica coffee—known for being beguilingly ornate and jasmine-like when fully washed, and seductively punchy and sweet when sundried--and hardly requires an introduction.
Sourcing Details:
Up to a few years ago when coffee exports were allowed only limited channels, the vast majority of coffee grown in this area was either processed and exported by the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU), consolidated under the wide-reaching Worka Cooperative, or sold anonymously through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX). But recent events, like the splitting of the Worka Cooperative into many smaller cooperatives, and changes in Ethiopia’s export rules has opened new opportunities to an increasing number of single farm owners and independent companies processing and exporting directly. It is an exciting time to be buying in Gedeo, where we expect to see new layers of coffee continuously unfold as its local industry accelerates.
Tracon Coffee’s Konga Station:
This particular processing station is owned and operated by Tracon Coffee, an independent exporter who manages 6 stations total in Gedeo. A few hundred individual smallholders contribute cherries to the Konga Station, each averaging about 3 hectares of coffee. Most of them also produce 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. The Konga, natural processed coffees are sorted by hand on arrival to the processing site and then taken directly to raised beds to fully dry, a process that takes about 21 days. Finished dried cherry pods are stored locally to rest and allow internal moisture to equilibrate, and then are de-husked before being trucked to Addis Ababa for their final dry milling and preparation for export.
