Ethiopia | Sidama Alo | 74158 Anaerobic Washed Grade 1

Tamiru Tadesse has been producing coffee for more than a decade in his home region of Bensa, Sidama. Coffee was once considered impossible at this altitude. As the climate shifted, Tamiru saw the opportunity and encouraged the farmers around Alo village to start growing it, with a focus on quality from the outset.

That work paid off in 2021, when his coffee won the Ethiopia Cup of Excellence. Tamiru says he entered the competition to promote the coffee his farmers grow, build better links to buyers and lift their incomes. Today smallholders deliver their cherry to the Alo Coffee wet mill, where it is sorted, processed and dried. This lot came to us as a 15kg vacuum-sealed exclusive lot, graded Grade 1 and cupped at 87.75 points.

Alo village sits in the Bensa district of Sidama in southern Ethiopia, between 2,340 and 2,480 metres above sea level. Warm days and cool nights at that elevation stretch out the ripening of the cherry. Yields are low, but the slow maturation builds sugar and dense, layered acidity in the bean. Good rainfall and nutrient-rich soil do the rest.

On the export market these coffees trade as Sidamo, the long-standing name for the region. Bensa has become one of the most celebrated pockets within it, and lots from this area have regularly placed at the top of the Ethiopia Cup of Excellence in recent years.

Anaerobic washed starts the same way as a classic washed coffee. Ripe cherry is hand-selected, then mechanically sorted to remove unripe fruit and debris, floated to pull out light and damaged beans, and pulped. The difference is the fermentation. Instead of sitting in open tanks for a day or so, the pulped coffee is sealed in tanks with the oxygen shut out for 84 to 96 hours. Without oxygen, different microbes do the work and the ferment slows right down, building aromatics an open tank won't produce.

The coffee is then taken out of the tanks and double washed in clean water to strip the mucilage off completely, before drying on shaded African beds for 10 to 20 days. That keeps the clarity of a washed coffee rather than the heavy fruit of a natural. In this lot it shows up as yellow pear and lime, with white tea and white florals, and a body that thickens with gentle tea-like tannins as it cools.

74158 is one of the selections released by the Jimma Agricultural Research Center (JARC), Ethiopia's national coffee research institute. Researchers collected seed from native Ethiopian coffee populations in the 1970s and selected trees for their resistance to coffee berry disease, their yield and their flavour, releasing them under numbered names. 74158 is an indigenous Sidamo selection, and it thrives here in its natural habitat.

It has since become one of the most prized varieties in Sidama, and especially in Bensa, where it has produced several Cup of Excellence winners. Growers value it for its disease resistance and consistency at very high altitude. Roasters chase it for a delicate, Gesha-like profile: florals, citrus and a tea-like finish.

That character is exactly what this lot delivers. The long anaerobic ferment adds depth and body without burying 74158's clarity, so the pear, lime and white florals stay bright and well defined. We roast it for filter to keep that definition intact.