This coffee was processed at a young site in the heart of the Yirgacheffe district. The cup quality of this area is historic to coffee, comprised mostly of indigenous landrace arabica variations, and known for rich berry-like and floral naturals.
Yirga Chefe Woreda
The Yirga Chefe woreda (district) is in the heart of southern Ethiopia’s coveted Gedeo Zone. Gedeo is a narrow section of highland plateau dense with savvy farmers and fiercely competitive processors comprising multiple districts and a long history of processing excellent coffee. However, the entire greater Gedeo zone is referred to commercially as “Yirgacheffe”, because of the distinctive terroir and because Yirga Chefe was one of Ethiopia’s first areas to fully wash its coffee, thereby forever associating with clean citrusy, floral cups that are annually one of a kind.
As a coffee terroir, the Yirga Chefe district 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.
Aricha itself is deeply tied to Yirgacheffe’s legendary celebrity. Originally the area was known as “Misty Valley” after the humidity that settles into the area at night. “Misty Valley” was used by some of the first processing sites in Aricha to brand their coffee, and the term became synonymous with Yirgacheffe specialty coffee long before traceable coffee was available elsewhere in the country.
Now, of course, there are multiple central processing stations in the Aricha area, and this one, owned by Mulugeta Tsige, is one of the most recent ones to be built.
Aricha Station and Processing
Mulugeta Tsige was born and raised in Yirga Chefe, in the Adame municipality, the descendent of 2 generations of coffee farmers. He worked helping his family with their coffee plots alongside his own education, and in 2005 began supplying coffee to exporters and eventually Ethiopia’s central commodity exchange (ECX) that acted as a goverment-owned exporter for a number of years. In 2021 Mulugeta earned his export license and began exporting directly to international buyers, and acquiring central processing sites of his own to manage completely independently.
By now, Mulugeta’s company has 2 of its own washing stations in Aricha and Hafursa, a natural drying site, and an upcoming site in Banko Gotiti, in the Worka region of southern Gedeo. And he still co-manages the original family estate in Aricha along with his family members.
Natural coffees at Aricha begin with daily cherry delivery and a careful hand sorting for uniform ripeness. Cherry is then moved straight to raised screen beds to dry, continuously rotated until the internal moisture reaches 10-12% moisture. Fully dried cherry pods are then stored for multiple weeks to stabilize moisture content and water activity, then de-hulled locally and transported to Addis Ababa for final milling and export.
