Coffees from individual farmers are becoming less difficult to find in Ethiopia, but they are still extremely rare and require a full supply chain in their support. Every year there are a few new farmers available from just a handful of exporters devoted to making it happen. Case in point: this is the very first time Bogalech’s coffee has been exported under her own name.
After decades of growing coffee and selling to a large local coop, Bogalech Muda has begun working with Konga Trading PLC, a small but highly specialized exporter based in central Yirgacheffe and founded, fittingly, by the former executive director of the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union. So, despite being a debut coffee, there is a lot of experience behind it.
Gedeb and Its Coffee
The district of Gedeb, where Bogalech’s farm is located, takes up the south-eastern corner of Ethiopia’s Gedeo Zone—a narrow section of plateau dense with savvy farmers whose coffee is known as “Yirgacheffe”, after the zone’s most famous district. Gedeb, however, is a terroir, history, and community all its own that merits unique designation in our eyes. Coffees from this community, much closer to Guji Zone than the rest of Yirgacheffe, are often the most explosive cup profiles we see from anywhere in Ethiopia. Naturals tend to have perfume-like volatiles, and fully washed lots are often sparklingly clean and fruit candy-like in structure.
Gedeb is remote but impressively industrious in coffee production. Half of its territory is planted with coffee. Until recently coffee exports were allowed only limited channels and the vast majority of coffee grown in this area was sold by the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU), consolidated under the wide-reaching Worka Cooperative, or sold anonymously through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX).
Today, however, in addition to the Worka Cooperative splitting into multiple smaller coops, there are increasing numbers of single farm owners like Bogalech and independent companies like Konga Trading who are processing and exporting direct. It is an exciting time to be buying in Gedeb, where we expect to see new layers of coffee continuously unfold as its local industry accelerates.
Bogalech’s Farm & Processing
The vast majority of coffee processing in Ethiopia is centralized due to complete lack of infrastructure or efficiencies at the farm level. Larger plots like Bogalech’s allow for greater personal control, and volumes large enough to be viable for exportation on their own. Bogalech’s farm is 12 hectares in size, enormous compared to the average 1 hectare or less belonging to most coffee producers in Gedeb.
Bogalech employs 6 pickers each harvest for cherry collection. Cherry is delivered throughout the day during harvest, where it is inspected and sorted for acceptability based on ripeness and uniformity. Once received, cherries are moved directly to the drying tables where they spread in a single layer to dry in the sun. The full drying process normally takes 3 weeks.
Once cherries have been thoroughly dried and rested, the dried fruit is hulled from the coffee seed locally, and then transferred to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. In Addis the coffee is dry-milled by Konga Trading PLC, using modern color sorting equipment and a fleet of trained workers who repeatedly hand-sort the coffee for export.
Takele Mammo, the founder of Konga Trading, was for many years the manager of Ethiopia’s Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (YCFCU), one of Ethiopia’s highest quality exporters and supply chains for Fairtrade and Organic certified coffee. During his time with the union, Takele, in partnership with Royal, regularly facilitated select individual farmer exports together each year from within the cooperative union structure. It was considered very unusual at the beginning, but over time this effort laid the groundwork for what is now a robust demand for unique, small-farm coffees from Ethiopia’s most famous specialty areas.
