Ethiopia - Worka Chelbesa FW [25/26]

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Filter: 64g/L, 96°C when fresh, go down to 63g/L, 92°C when well rested

Espresso: 18g/50g/15-20s turbo/soup - super light and floral

We're tasting: Aromatics of lemon shortbread, heather honey and ripe pear, in the cup it's sticky and sweet - we find dried apricot, comice pear and honeydew melon, with a very sweet lemon & osmanthus iced tea as the base. Throughout the cup it's softly floral reminding us of elderflower & dried jasmine.

Traceability

The Story

SNAP operates as a vertically integrated exporter rather than a farm or a single site, financing and running washing stations across Gedeo, Guji and West Arsi before milling everything centrally at its own dry mill outside Addis Ababa. The business was built by Negusse Debela Weldyes following the reforms that allowed exporters to bypass the commodity exchange and buy cherry directly, and the Chelbesa operation dates from the earliest years of that shift, with a second site at Danche (nearby to Chelbesa one) added shortly afterwards. This is our third season buying from the two stations, and they're considered legends amongst the industry for good reason - you could set your watch to the quality they produce.

Gedeb is the southernmost woreda of the Gedeo Zone, on the edge of the Guji border with Yirgacheffe. Guji alone started getting separated and given its own distinct classification at the turn of the millennium, and coffees from Gedeb - a micro-region nestled between the wider Yirgacheffe/Sidama catchment and Guji - have started to come into their own in the last decade as sitting between the two profiles. As speciality coffee in Ethiopia evolves - especially since those export reforms that allowed private direct exports outside of the Ethiopian commodity exchange (ECX), Ethiopia is becoming akin to wine in having very distinct growing regions with their own unique profiles.

Farms in Gedeb sit between roughly 1900 and 2200 metres on the eastern escarpment of the Rift valley, planted beneath enset (false banana) and local shade canopy in an agroforestry system that was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2023 (the Gedeo Cultural Landscape), and which supports one of the most densely populated rural populations anywhere in Africa. As with many parts of Ethiopia, smallholder farms are small and fragmenting further with each generation, as inheritance rules mean farms are continuously sub-divided, driving plots below the size suitable for income self-sufficiency, and with expansion generally not a viable route, and the only route to improved farmer income is a higher price per kilogram of cherry.

The 25/26 Ethiopian crop tells a story of two very distinctive and opposite halves - in terms of production it was a national record, yet speciality is telling a story of a down year and extremely limited production. With coffee frequently following a biennial crop cycle - an up year in production is followed by a down year as trees recover - the different regions of Ethiopia with their unique microclimates and weather show a different cycle. The west - Limu, Kaffa, Benchmaji - had an abundance of production, but these regions are also where the bulk of Ethiopian commodity coffee production comes from; whereas the southern speciality zones - Yirgacheffe, Sidama, Guji, West Arsi, etc - all had a down year, with either early or late harvests and generally across the board very short harvest windows.

Combine this with the macro-economic outlook: Ethiopian minimum cherry prices (paid to farmers at the point of sale/farm gate) and minimum export prices (an exporter cannot sell a certain grade of coffee internationally for less) are set by the government, and they are not pegged to the "C" price (Commodities Arabica futures market). We've had a year or two of record high global commodity coffee prices - but the preceding Ethiopian harvest occurred during the first real rocket upwards in price. This left early harvest commitments at a real positive price arbitrage for the coffee buyer - Ethiopia was cheap relative to the insane spike in prices. Not wanting to lose out on the value of the upcoming crop, on the back of continued high prices the Ethiopian government set... ambitious price floors for this most recent harvest. One must always remember that for coffee producing countries, coffee is an export product - one that is traded in US dollars, bringing dollars in to the local economy. If you are not an oil producing country, and you want fuel, you require dollars to pay for it - so if you can sell your product (such as coffee) for a higher price, it helps stabilise your country and your local currency (and indeed, there's a whole tangent about black market Birr:Usd rates and intentional currency devaluation that would & is be relevant to this piece, but we'll park it for now).

The scenario this leads to is: If you're a washing station owner, your costs to buy cherries have skyrocketed, by up to 3-4x compared to last year. There's very little availability of cherries, and even though your costs have gone up, your access to finance has not (often station owners are working on finance at the start of the season and will have it paid off by the time the coffee is exported). Washed coffees typically sell for lower prices than naturals, and therefore had the lowest expected payoff from the perspective of a station owner. Many smallholder farmers instead held onto their own cherry and dried it at home - with all the quality risks that come with it - hoping to make a sale on the secondary market which opens later, and capture the maximum amount of value that comes from it. In the face of this, many stations did not open to purchase cherry and stayed quiet, and those that did open opted to focus on naturals and special preparations such as anoxics or other experimental lots (adding as much value as possible to try and off-set the price increase they had in their own inputs)

Those that did produce washed coffee tended to be operations such as SNAP - vertically integrated, with market access and capital to weather the storm, with buyers lining up round the corner with consistent year on year demand. There's more to be said on the Ethiopian harvest this year - as of course, the high C-market price that cherry and export was based around at the start of the year hasn't been sustained and many producers and exporters have been left trying to catch a falling knife, the opposite scenario to last year's harvest where arbitrage left Ethiopian coffees cheap(er) relative to the market, this year they're more expensive. But we think the biggest takeaway is there would be a temptation as a buyer to only focus on the smallest indie outfits in Ethiopia - to completely shy away from the big names in the name of some ideological purity. But this year, with rare exceptions it was the big names who had the money (and the demand) to take on the risk of producing washed coffee - so we're glad we've taken a measured approach always to our buying in Ethiopia, working with a select few partners who span the entire gamut of production. Anyway Chelbesa, despite tricky circumstances, bangs once again and we hope you all enjoy it as much as we do