Some Ethiopian coffee comes at you dark and jammy. This one goes the other way, light on its feet, more perfume than punch. It grows in Shantawene, a community tucked into the Bensa hills of Sidama, where 725 farmers work plots small enough to walk across in a minute and shade their coffee under false banana trees. The cup is delicate and bright, white peach and orange sorbet up top, with a soft assam tea pull underneath that keeps it from floating off entirely. It drinks like sunlight through a screen door. Barely there, and you miss it the second it's gone.
Region: Sidama, Ethiopia
Community: Shantawene (Bensa woreda)
Washing Station: Ayla
Producers: 725 smallholder farmers
Altitude: ~1,950 masl
Variety: Ethiopia landraces
Process: Washed. 48 to 72 hour ferment in cement tanks, dried 10 days under parabolic cover
Certification: Organic
Best for: Pour over, filter
Getting to this coffee is a WHOLE THING. Fly into Addis Ababa, catch a second flight to Hawassa, then drive three hours into the hills until the road runs out at a washing station called Ayla. The farmers who supply it have their own version of the same trip, an hour each way over rough ground, some by truck, some walking alongside a mule with the day's cherries on its back.
The farms up here are teeny-tiny, a tenth of a hectare to two hectares, coffee grown in the shade of false banana trees on soil so naturally rich nobody bothers to fertilize it. It's the main thing people grow and the main way they earn, which makes what's happening around them worth watching. Khat and eucalyptus are creeping in, thirsty crops that drink the water table down fast. Coffee's the native one, the plant that belongs in these forests and stitches them together. The people still growing it are choosing the harder, older thing on purpose.
The processing leans light and careful. Cherries go into water tanks first so the floaters rise and get skimmed, then they're depulped and left to ferment in cement tanks for two to three days. After that the parchment goes out onto raised beds under a parabolic cover, out of the hard sun, and dries slow over ten days. Gentle handling start to finish, which is exactly why the cup comes out the way it does.
And it's a pretty one. White peach and orange sorbet right up front, all sweetness and lift. Underneath there's a soft assam tea note, a little tannic, a little grounding, the thing that keeps all that brightness tethered. Clean, floral, barely there.
It takes three flights and a mule to get this out of the mountains. The wonder is that something this delicate survives the trip at all, and shows up in your cup still tasting like the morning it was picked.
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