Ethiopia - Gatta Honey [24/25]

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Lightest Roaster Influence: A broader spread of varieties - both JARC cultivars and landraces local to Bensa makes it a trickier lot to profile, but we’re excited with the first few batches so far. Very light, bright and high acidity

Best rested for: 3-4 weeks

For Filter: We recommend a ratio of 65g/L, 96°C water for more sticky stonefruit. 58g/L and 98°C, with a coarser grounds pushes florals. Drop temps 3-4°C once well rested

For Espresso: 18g in, 50g out, 20-25s turbo-style shots are our preference for peak juice.

We’re tasting:  Super bright citrus aromatics that remind us of twisting the oils from an orange rind. In the cup, mandarin sweetness and acidity, the floral sweetness of muscat grape, ripe apricot, fig leaf, honeysuckle & peach. Very sweet with a zesty brightness.

Traceability:

The Story

We’ve made a commitment to try and work with producer owned value chains wherever possible. This means that those that grow the coffee, also manage the exporting and importing process ensuring that the maximum value for our purchase is returned upstream. This means both working with smaller independent outfits, as well as larger operations. 

Daye Bensa was founded by two brothers - Asefa and Mulugeta in 1996, setting up a farm and washing station in the Bensa region of Sidama. Initially only selling internally (as Ethiopia has a strong internal market for coffee - around 50% of what is grown in Ethiopia never leaves its borders), in 2006 they started exporting coffee internationally. Since then, Daye Bensa has grown to be one of the top 5 largest international exporters by volume (and most assuredly higher by quality!) in Ethiopia, but still to this day family owned and based in-country. 

Atrie from Coffee Legends is Asefa’s brother in law - having worked as a manager for Daye Bensa, with a stint in finance in the UK, he took the leap to set up a UK import office for Daye Bensa, an exporter which eponymously first started with a single washing station (Qonqa'na)  in the Bensa Woreda of Sidama. 

Bensa is an area that sits right in the heart of the prime coffee growing lands in Sidama. The Shantawene village inside this Woreda has grown internationally famous for the coffees produced in this area - gaining early notoriety with the rise of third wave coffee, and likely due to no small part on behalf of the efforts of Asefa & Mulegeta.

Daye Bensa's Gatta Farm was first established with several areas of planting (with majority JARC improved cultivars) in 2013, with a processing and drying station built in 2017 once the trees had matured. The farm is integrated with natural old-growth forestry, and both grows and produces its own output as well as buying cherry from neighbouring smallholders for further onwards processing.

This mixture of established local landraces and improved cultivars grown on the farm (with the additional agricultural resources that a company like Daye Bensa can employ) ensures the quality coming out of Gatta is superlative. We’ll try and get that anoxic lot next year, but for now this honey lot has all the best characteristics of a washed Sidama (bright citrus and florals) alongside a natural (sticky, fruit-forward sweetness) - firmly ticking all the boxes and a coffee we’re thoroughly enjoying