With perfume-like florals and flavors of nectarine and mango, this lot from the beloved Guji zone is produced by Kalacha Gudina, a small but historic cooperative first founded in the 1990s and now part of the greater Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, the largest unionization of coffees farmers in Ethiopia.
Brief History & Flavor Profile
Ethiopia’s Guji zone is a distant and heavily forested swath of land stretching southeast through the lower corner of the massive Oromia region. Guji is heavy with primary forest thanks to the Guji tribe, a part of Ethiopia’s vast and diverse Oromo nation, who have for generations organized and legislated to reduce mining and logging outfits in their area, in a struggle to conserve the land’s sacred canopy. Compared to other coffee-heavy regions, large parts of Guji feel like prehistoric backwoods. Coffee farms in many parts of Guji begin at 2000 meters in elevation and tend to climb from there. The highland farming communities in this part of the country can be at turns Edenic in their natural purity, and startlingly remote.
Guji’s coffees, when well-produced, are often juicier and jammier in balance than nearby Yirgacheffe, which is known for more floral or herbaceous and lemony coffees. Clear stone fruit juice and candy-like acids structures are hallmarks of washed coffee from this area.
Kalacha Gudina and Processing
Farmer members contributing to Kalacha Gudina are quintessential Ethiopian family farms: small and forested, whose production is often divided between spacious, lofty coffee trees, other fruits or legumes, and enset, a fruitless cousin of the banana plant whose pulp is 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.
Washed coffee is produced very straightforwardly at the coop. Cherry is picked daily during harvest and delivered to the coop by individual farmers. All cherry is sorted on arrival for imperfections and uniform ripeness. Coffee is depulped and fermented overnight in open tanks, and then washed clean and soaked in fresh water before being transferred to the raised drying tables. The parchment coffee dries in the sun for an average of 2 weeks, after which it is brought into the local warehouse for storage, prior to being transported to Addis Ababa for final dry milling and export.
Oromia Farmers Cooperative Union
The Oromia Regional State is Ethiopia’s largest, including more than 110,000 square miles and 35 million people. It touches the borders of both Kenya to the south and South Sudan to the west, and includes Ethiopia’s massive capital city, Addis Ababa, along with 65% of Ethiopia coffee growing territory, as of 2014. There are a number of famous coffee regions included in full or in part in Oromia: Jimma and Illubabor in the west; Harar to the northeast; Arsi, bordering Sidama in the mid-south, which produces many similar terroirs; and the Guji Zone, where Royal also works with a diversity of forward-thinking growers and processors.
The Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (OCFCU) is an umbrella organization established in 1999 by 34 individual cooperatives interested in centralizing resources and gaining leverage in the export market.
As of 2020, OCFCU supports more than 400 individual cooperatives--more than 400,000 households, by far the largest unionization of farmers in the country. Premiums from coffee exports are returned directly to farmers, and the union also funds organic farming programs, mill equipment purchases, and food security programs. OCFCU has established a central cupping lab to support quality control and is a founding shareholder in its members’ bank, the Cooperative Bank of Oromia, that provides pre-harvest financing and crop insurance; both resources historically unavailable to rural farmers in Ethiopia.
OCFCU has been Fairtrade and Organic certified since 2002 and ever since has been one of the world’s largest suppliers of Fairtrade coffee.
