AYLA

Testi Specialty Coffee runs the Ayla washing station in Bensa, in the Sidama region of Ethiopia, which Faysel Abdosh established in 2018 and named after his niece. Around 800 smallholder farmers deliver ripe cherry to the station from gardens sitting between roughly 1,950 and 2,000 metres, where the high elevation slows ripening and concentrates sweetness. In a few short years the station has become known for clean, floral, high grown Sidama lots, the result of careful cherry intake, controlled fermentation, and patient drying on raised beds.

74158 is one of the improved varieties developed by the Jimma Agricultural Research Center in Ethiopia, released to give farmers a plant that could shrug off coffee berry disease while still cupping beautifully. The number itself tells the story, as the 74 marks the year it was catalogued, back in 1974. Up in the highlands of Sidama it is often grown and sold under the local landrace name Kurume, tended in the traditional garden system alongside food crops. Growers value it for being dependable in the field and expressive in the cup, giving clean, floral coffees with citrus and sweet berry in both washed and natural styles.

The washed process is the cleanest and most precise way to prepare coffee, and the one that lets a single origin and variety speak most clearly. Every trace of fruit and sticky mucilage is stripped away before the bean is dried, usually by fermenting it loose in tanks and rinsing it off with water, or by scrubbing it away mechanically. Because no fruit is left touching the bean as it dries, nothing masks the raw character of the coffee itself. That is why the washed method is trusted for the finest lots, showing off clarity, bright lively acidity, and the clear stamp of where the coffee was grown.