Ethiopia Yirgacheffe 2 Washed Aricha - 39228 - GrainPro Bags - SPOT SHANGHAI

This coffee was processed at a private processing site in the heart of the Yirgacheffe district, founded in 2010. The cup quality of this area is historic to coffee, comprised mostly of indigenous landrace arabica variations, and known for crisp and highly aromatic fully washed profiles.

Yirga Chefe Kebele

The Yirga Chefe kebele, or 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, and has been known commercially as Yirgacheffe for many years after the Yirgacheffe district itself, one of Ethiopia’s first areas to fully wash its coffee. As a coffee terroir, Yirgacheffe 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 Netsanet Kebede, is one of the more recent to be built.

Aricha Station and Processing

Netsanet’s processing station receives coffee cherry from 250 smallholder farmers in the immediate vicinity. Farmers in the Aricha area average just around 2 hectares per household and in addition to coffee cultivate avocado, soy beans, sugar cane, and enset, a fruitless relative of the banana tree whose inner pulp is scraped, packed into cakes, fermented undergound, and then toasted and consumed as a staple starch.

Washed coffees at Aricha begin with daily cherry delivery and a careful hand sorting for uniform ripeness. Cherry is depulped and fermented underwater for 24-48 hours, and then rinsed with fresh water the following day. After the parchment is fully cleaned it is moved to raised screen beds to dry, continuously rotated until the internal moisture reaches 11.5%. This typically takes 7-10 days to complete. Fully dried parchment is then stored for multiple weeks to stabilize moisture content and water activity.

Once fully cured, parchment is transferred to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital. In Addis the coffee is dry-milled by Tadesse Desta Import & Export, using modern color sorting equipment and a fleet of trained workers who repeatedly hand-sort the coffee for export.