GOTITI

We buy this one from the station at Banko Gotiti, high on the ridge east of Gedeb town in Gedeo. The farmers who deliver there work gardens rather than farms, most of them a hectare or two, planted beneath false banana and shade trees and worked without chemicals because nobody here ever started using them. The elevation does a lot of the work. Ripening runs slow and the cherry comes in dense and sweet. There are several stations in this corner of Gedeb and the kebele names travel further than any one of them. Banko Gotiti is the one we wanted, for how clean and bright its washed lots taste.

Ethiopian heirloom, sometimes written as mixed heirloom, is not a single named variety at all. It is the term used for the thousands of indigenous landrace types that grow across Ethiopia, the birthplace of Arabica coffee. Many of these plants have never been formally catalogued, and have instead been selected and passed down by farming families over countless generations, each one adapted to the exact hillside and altitude where it grows. This deep genetic diversity is a big part of what makes Ethiopian coffee so distinctive, giving cups that are floral and citric with a delicate tea like quality, bright acidity, and layered fruit that can shift from one village to the next.

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.