Royal buys grade 4 naturals from Guji for their balanced character that typically includes dried fruit flavors, creamy textures, earth and chocolate, along with a typically great price point relative to other regions in southern Ethiopia. Grade 1 naturals are sourced from central processing sites, large estates, and often a combination of the two, in which “outgrowers”, or local smallholders, sell to large estates who process cherry on site.
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.
Processing Detail & Quality Control
Cherry is received at all times during the long harvest days. Once received, cherries are sorted for ripeness and consistency and moved directly to raised drying tables where they are spread in a single layer to dry in the sun. The full drying process normally takes 3-6 weeks depending on the local climate at the time, and the final resting moisture content of the fruit is 11.5%. Once cherries have been thoroughly dried and rested, the dried fruit is hulled from the coffee seed in local mills, and then transferred to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. In Addis the coffee is dry-milled by exporters who use modern color sorting equipment and often fleets of trained workers who repeatedly hand-sort the coffee to the correct grade for export.
