Ethiopia | Yirgacheffe Huke | Kurume & Wolisho Natural Premium Grade 1

This lot was processed at Huke, a privately owned washing station in the Yirgacheffe woreda of the Gedeo zone, sitting in the kebele of Banko Gotiti at 2,100 metres. Testi Coffee built it in 2021 as a deliberately “premium” facility — the site was chosen for its elevation, its surrounding farms and its access to clean water, rather than for convenience. It is one of 28 stations Testi now runs, all of them founded by Faysel A. Yonis.

Around 500 independent outgrowers deliver cherry here through the harvest, from Banko Gotiti and the neighbouring kebeles of Chelba, Chelchele and Chelbessai. Here is the part that matters: Huke keeps each kebele’s cherry separate and processes it as its own lot. Most stations pool everything. This coffee is the Banko Gotiti lot, and nothing else is in the bag.

The farms feeding it are tiny — under a hectare is typical — and organic by default rather than by certificate, with coffee growing among maize, grain and bananas under native Birbira, Wanza and Acacia shade. Farms sit between 2,000 and 2,200 metres. Cool air at that height slows the cherry right down, and slow cherry is where the density and the sweetness come from.

This lot was produced under Testi’s Premium Cherry Selection programme, running since 2018. The mechanism is simple and it is the right one: Testi pays farmers a premium for delivering only the ripest fruit. Not more fruit — better fruit. Underripe cherry is where most of the astringency in Ethiopian naturals comes from, and paying for ripeness at the point of delivery removes the incentive to strip the branch.

Grade 1 is Ethiopia’s highest classification. It is a defect count, not a taste score — it means an enormous amount of sorting happened before this coffee left the country.

Cherry is hand-sorted and floated on arrival to pull out anything unripe, overripe or damaged. It is then split into 25kg batches and laid on raised beds in layers only about 5cm thick, and turned five to six times a day so no part of the fruit ferments faster than the rest. It is covered at midday against full sun and again overnight against dew. Once the fruit hits roughly 25% moisture — the “raisin stage” — the layers are gradually deepened and kept out of direct sun.

The whole dry-down takes 15 to 21 days depending on weather. The coffee is then hulled and rested in parchment until export. Natural processing is often described as the easy one. Done to this standard it is the opposite.

This lot is mostly Kurume and Wolisho — landrace varieties selected out of the forest generations ago and propagated across Gedeo and Sidama ever since. Five are commonly named, all after indigenous trees: Bedessa, Kurume, Mique, Sawe and Wolisho. They differ visibly in the field; Kurume throws a smaller cherry than Wolisho.

The trade tends to file all of it under “heirloom”, which is a polite way of saying nobody checked. It erases varieties that the farmers themselves name and tell apart, and it ignores the numbered selections from the Jimma Agricultural Research Center. We would rather tell you what is actually in the bag.

Gedeo sits in south-west Ethiopia and is named for the Gedeo people. Its soils are iron-rich and acidic, temperatures sit between 15 and 18°C, and rainfall is reliable — coffee here grows in family gardens alongside food crops, shaded by Cordia africana, acacia and ensete, with next to no fertiliser or pesticide because there is no ready access to either.

Yirgacheffe is a woreda inside Gedeo, not a region — and it is one of only three Ethiopian coffee names the country has trademarked. For most of its history this coffee was sold as “Sidama”, the far broader classification covering much of central-south Ethiopia, and its distinctiveness was invisible in the price. Yirgacheffe earning its own name is the reason a lot like this one can be traced to a single village.

Since 2018, Ethiopian washing stations have been able to export directly instead of pushing everything through the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange. The ECX gave farmers stability, but its auction model stripped out traceability — coffee went in as a grade and a region and came out anonymous. Direct export, or Vertical Integration, is why we can name the station, the kebele and the 500 families who picked it. This lot came to us through Melbourne Coffee Merchants, who buy directly from Testi.