complex fruity and sweetness coffee, mandarin orange and citrus based flavor, syrup sweetness, jasmine aroma.
Guji Uraga comes from Southwestern Ethiopia. It’s here that a group of about 600 smallholders come together at the washing station of to process their coffees. Uraga Washing Station has 12 standardized fermentation tanks and is following international coffee washing and preparation rules and procedures. The coffee is dried on more than 280 drying beds, each one marked with a code to track the processing status.
The cherries are sorted and pulped, the beans are fermented for 36 to 48 hours and then washed. The wet beans are placed on raised drying beds in thin layers and turned every 2 to 3 hours during the first few days of the drying process. Depending on weather, the beans are dried for 10 to 12 days.
Most contributing farmers own less than a hectare of land, and they grow coffee simply as a backyard cash crop. Coffee will usually be interspersed with other subsistence crops, such as sweet potato, mangos and avocados, but there are no other primary cash crops grown in the region. Income from coffee is important but minimal for most farmers due to the small size of their farms. As such, inputs are minimal – most coffee grown in the region is 100% organic, though not certified, as farmers simply don’t have the money to apply chemical fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides.
- Origin – Ethiopia
- Region – Uraga, Sidama Zone
- Washing station – Uraga Washing Station
- Altitude – 1650-1680m
- Variety – Heirloom
- Process – washed
- Grade – G1
- Sourcing: Urban Coffee Roaster
About the Guji Zone:
Guji is part of the Oromia region in southern Ethiopia, next door to Gedeo Zone (SNNPR) where the famous Yirgacheffe micro-region is located. This steep, green area is both fertile and high, with much of the coffee growing at 2,000m and above. Coffee grown in the Guji zone was once classified under Sidamo (a larger zone next door in the SNNPR region.) Recently, Guji has become its own recognised area in coffee, thanks to the newly opened ECX coffee delivery centre, as well as the separating classification given to Guji beans; due to their unique cup profile and physical attributes.
Around 85 percent of Ethiopians still live rurally and make a living from agriculture; each family usually lives in a modest home (often a single round mud hut) and farms their own plot of land, where they grow both cash crops and food for their own consumption. In Guji, coffee is one of the main cash crops – covering from half a hectare to 1.5 hectares (the latter is considered big). This is usually planted alongside a second cash crop – often a large-leafed tree used in making roofs for (and also shade provider for the coffee) known as ‘false banana’. This looks like a banana tree but isn’t – instead its thick stem is used to produce both a nutritious flour and a fermented paste that staple ingredients (particularly across southern Ethiopia).
There is only one main harvest a year in Ethiopia – this usually takes place in November and December across all of the country’s growing regions. There are, on average, 4 passes made during the harvest period, and, in regions that produce both washed and naturals, the last pass is used for the natural coffee. Washed coffees are then generally pulped on the same day that they are picked (usually in the evening/night), sorted into three grades by weight (heavy, medium and floaters), fermented (times vary – usually between 16 and 48 hours), washed and then usually graded again in the washing channels. The beans are then dried on raised beds, where they are hand-sorted, usually by women.
About the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange and Traceability:
For many years, Ethiopian coffee, some of the best in the world, was for the most part untraceable.
Starting in 2008, Ethiopia began the centralization of all coffee exports through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), where the coffees were ‘anonymised’, stripped of any information other than region, in the interest of the farmers, who were meant to receive top dollar for quality regardless of the ‘name’ of the washing station or farm. Coffees moving through the ECX were (still are) delivered to certified coffee labs, where they were cupped according to profile then graded and marked generically for export. This ‘equalising’ measure certainly benefitted some producers, but it had the negative impact of eliminating most roasters’ and importers’ ability to provide accurate information of the precise traceability of coffees. Even after the opening of the ‘second window’ (devised for direct sales of cooperative and certified coffee), as of the end of 2017 some 90 percent of coffees still moved through the ECX.
The end of March 2017 saw a huge overturning of this mandatory system. In a bill raised by the Ethiopian Coffee & Tea Development and Marketing Authority, Ethiopian coffee (even that sold through the ECX) can be marketed and sold with full traceability intact. The aim is to limit black market dealings, to demand higher prices and to enable Ethiopian producers to share in a greater piece of the pie.
In a bit more detail, the new system allows any exporter with a valid license to sell directly to buyers without placing the coffee on the ECX first. There is a slight caveat – the parchment coffee will have to be sold within three days of arriving at the processing plant in Addis. If it is still unsold after three days (which is quite likely), it must be sold through the ECX: BUT with its traceability info intact rather than being deleted. Additionally, it is proposed that oversees companies will be able to plant and sell coffee, though this is still undetermined as of 2018/19’s harvest.
(Sourced: http://www.coffeehunter.com )