Ethiopia - Megadu Lacto Natural - Lot D [25/26]

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter/Espresso

Lightest Roaster Influence: We've been tweaking round the edges on this one - we first approached it like we would a funkier coffee, dropping at a very low temperature and short development time. We've actually found it responded better somewhere between there and a classic natural, not needing to be handled with such kid-gloves.

Best Rested: 4+ weeks 

Filter: 64g/L, 93°C when fresh, move down to 91°C with rest. 

Espresso: 18g/48g/18-22s. Excellent soup/turbo

We’re tasting: Super fun candylike aromatics - bubblegum, foam sweets and tropical fruits. In the cup while hot it's super sweet and interesting, with heaps of tropical fruit (pineapple, guava, soursop, and mango) with a creamy lactic acidity - a bit like tropical yoghurt, with floral lavender & honeysuckle. As it cools we're finding the acidity becomes a bit more prominent, and the cup evolves to remind us of zippy rosé champagne, with flaked coconut and raspberry undertones. Belter!

Traceability

The Story

A little side note - Bette Buna called these experiments the "Yeast Frenzy" series. We'll admit we bottled it, couldn't bring ourselves to put that on the label.

25/26 Ethiopia Harvest:

In many coffee producing countries, the harvest cycle is characterised by up-years and down-years - without consistent agrichemical/organic inputs to feed the trees, a bumper crop is followed by a year of recovery for the trees, their organic matter picked, processed, dried and shipped to become the beverage we all so love.

Having made the commitment to only travel on origin trips when we were buying serious volume - so that we could make the effort of hosting us be duly matched with the buying firepower we could bring to bear - we had always planned that Ethiopia would be one of our first trips out.

It's just so happened that this year has coincided with a down-cycle crop and extremely limited availabilities of coffee, where the best lots went to those who cupped at origin - we wish we could say we planned it like this, but it was a lucky break, we just wanted to come say hey and cup with our key partners.  As a result of the trip, we've committed early and secured one of the most exciting slates of coffees we've yet sourced, and we're stoked for the rest of the season. We will (soon) get to writing in full about the latest harvest - in particular, why we expect to see many more naturals and special preps, and why there's a particular paucity of washed coffees - as the season has ended and things have moved into export, we need to get the final pieces of research and discussion done to be able to provide the full narrative arc.

Bette Buna:

The first Bette Buna (“House of Coffee”)  farm was founded in 2019, after Dawit inherited his grandfather’s coffee farm in Sidama. Dawit’s grandfather was a respected community leader, and with that in mind Hester and Dawit set out to create a sustainable, community led future for coffee farming in Ethiopia. They intend to achieve this by producing higher quality coffees, with collaboration and community development intimately linked to this. The funds from fair pricing and export help pay for community education and increased living standards, with living incomes a pillar of the Bette Buna mission.

Dawit and Hester have been purchasing the farms immediately abutting the Taferi Kela farm, adopting a high standard for purchasing (a minimum price for the land, alongside paying out 2 years of future production profits for the land at the point of sale), alongside offering the farmers employment at Taferi Kela. 

By acting as a vertically integrated supply chain and increasing the export value of the centrally processed coffees, this both increases the income of the farmers turned employees beyond what selling their cherry to a station might have done, and socialises the profits whilst removing personal risk. Bette Buna have also established a nursery at Taferi Kela, distributing both improved JARC cultivars (higher yielding and more disease resistant) as well as shade trees and staple food crops, providing stable and consistent year round employment to the local community.

The impact of this nursery in terms of livelihood for subsistence farming cannot be understated, and the return to agro-forestry by increased shade tree planting is a positive move on a warming planet, and the distribution is directly tied to agronomic training workshops that help further increase yield and quality (and income) to boot. 
The work to establish more shade trees is hand-in-hand with a rewilding project to increase the native forest cover in the immediate area around Taferi Kela, and we expect to see this region increasingly start to get prestige off the back of their work.

Dawit and Hester’s second farm (the farm this lot hails from)  is located in Guji, a region that has become famed for the particular quality of the natural process coffees produced here. Coffees from Guji are deeply fruity and berrylike, something we particularly enjoyed as a contrast when compared to the tarter citrus and white flower cups that you might find in Yirgacheffe or Sidama coffees.

The provenance of Ethiopian coffee regions is really not unlike that of the different wine regions in France - particular combinations of altitude, microclimate and the local predominance of local landraces vs locally improved cultivar plantings (akin in effect to the different varieties of grapes you might find in the wine regions) shift the cup profile. Fruit flavours are a real highlight of Ethiopian coffee - from the lower grade lots that intermingle with chocolate and spice notes, to the highest grades that are so outrageously sweet, bright and floral that prior to high technical intervention coffee used to be the main gateway into discovering speciality coffee. We think that Ethiopia is such an under-valued origin - the same cup profile from a high altitude farm in Central or South America would command a hefty premium.

The Megadu farm in Guji is over 220 HA, lead by 3 community leaders (Abbaa Gadaa). Of this 220 HA, Bette Buna manages a quarter, acting as a pilot project for many of the community lead initiatives Hester and Dawit run. The processing station, located centrally in the farm, allows high value return processing (such as anoxic fermentation and extended ferments) alongside well executed classic processing, and crucially drying. Both farms produce their own coffee for production, but also purchase cherry from local smallholders for onwards processing.