Chelchele station is located in the coveted Gedeb district, the southernmost district of Ethiopia’s famous Gedeo zone. Nearly all of Gedeb is known for its gifted processing climate and experienced growers. Washed and natural coffees alike from this area tend to be dense and fruit-forward, ranging from sparkling clean acidic fruits to jammy or herbal concentrated sweetness.
Gedeb and Its Coffee:
Gedeo zone is a narrow section of Ethiopia’s southern highland plateau dense with savvy farmers, a famous terroir, and high competition for cherry. Gedeo as a whole is frequently referred to as “Yirgacheffe”, after the zone’s most famous central district. Gedeb, however, is a terroir, history, and community all its own that merits unique designation in our eyes. Coffees from this district, much closer to Guji zone than the rest of Gedeo, 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. The Gedeb district is a remote but impressively industrious area for coffee production. Half of its territory is planted with coffee. The city of Gedeb itself is a bustling outpost that links commerce between the Guji and Gedeo Zones, with an expansive network of processing stations who buy cherry from across zone borders. The communities surrounding Gedeb reach some of the highest growing elevations for coffee in the world and are a truly enchanting part of the landscape.
Processing Details
This particular processing station has hundreds of individual smallholders contributing cherries, each averaging about 3 hectares of coffee cultivation. 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 washed processed coffees are sorted by hand on arrival, then floated to remove less dense and damaged cherries. Next the sorted cherries are depulped, fermented and washed, and then taken to raised beds to fully dry, a process that takes about 18 days. Finished dried parchment is stored locally to rest and allow internal moisture to equilibrate, and then trucked to Addis Ababa to be dehulled and for additional sorting and preparation for export.
