No origin is closer to my heart (Micah speaking here) than Ethiopia. I've spent many a lovely month and year in the Motherland of coffee, and to my mind, no coffees are better. I cupped about 150 different lots from Ethiopia this year, and we are blowing out the budget with 15 different coffees from Yirgacheffe, Sidamo, Harrar, and Jimma, and now it's time for the Guji gang to report for duty! Guji is synonymous with berries and creaminess in our minds, and this Goro is a banger. Ethiopia is having an absolutely beautiful production this year in the midst of political and social turmoil, so we're stocking up and trying to highlight the diversity of coffees from this lush and fruitful country. You can expect notes of Parma Violets and Strawberry Yoghurt from this absolute beauty.
We sourced this coffee with our friends at Falcon, and if you're another roaster in the UK, we highly recommend hitting them up for samples of this and other Ethiopians this year! Eros is killing the game. The exporter was Buno Coffee, who I used to cup with all the time when I lived in Addis. Great folks, at a young, up and coming exporting company.
Buno Coffee Trading is a relatively small exporter who manage 7 washing stations located in the area of Guji in Ethiopia’s southern region. Very high terroir at well over 2000 masl and an abundance of relatively young, healthy trees whose maturation is gradual, means ideal conditions for producing outstanding cup qualities. Producers in the area grow their coffee around the lush forests on the hills and village outskirts under the shade of indigenous trees like Cordia Africana, Acacia and Albizzia.
Buno was established in 2018 and is managed by Mr. Abiyot who oversees the selection of partner farmers, the processing of cherry and the drying practices. Buno is focused on working with farmers with between 8-15 hectares of land which makes quality improvements easier to manage and ensures that produced volumes of cherry can be separated into single producer micro-lots. To ensure that farmers wait to pick only fully ripened cherries, Buno pays farmers a premium of one birr for every kilo delivered after the harvest. Additionally, Buno provides a credit line to farmers during the off-season for harvest related expenses. The loan is then deducted from their payment upon cherry selection, interest free.
The cherry selection we have witnessed at Buno’s sites are by far the best we have seen in Ethiopia. One of Buno’s sites, Dikitu, has 120 raised beds which is are exclusively for processing natural coffees. 12 farmers contributed to this lot who, on average, have farms 6 hectares in size. The farmgate price paid to them for their coffee was 45-50 Ethiopian Birr per kg of cherry. coffee in this area grows under a canopy of native shade trees such as acacia and wanza. The local soil is volcanic fertile red soil and deep sandy loam. The washing station was established in 2005 and has been managed under Abiyot Boru for 10 years
