Ethiopia Worka Chelbesa

Worka Chelbesa comes from the Gedeb district of Ethiopia's Gedeo Zone, an area that has earned a reputation for producing some of the country's most distinctive coffees. The landscape around Chelbesa is characterized by dense, semi-forested vegetation, where coffee grows beneath a layered canopy alongside enset and other crops at elevations reaching 2,200 meters above sea level.

This lot brings together coffee grown by hundreds of smallholder farmers surrounding the village of Worka Chelbesa and processed by SNAP Specialty Coffee. SNAP was founded by Negusse Debela in Addis Ababa in 2008 with a focus on improving the quality and consistency of Ethiopian specialty coffee.

In 2019, SNAP established its Danche wet mill within Chelbesa to work more closely with farmers in the surrounding community and purchase ripe red cherry from nearby producers. One of the more distinctive features of the station is its ceramic fermentation tanks. The ceramic helps retain heat during fermentation while contributing to the clean, precise character for which coffees from the station have become known.

The coffee is composed primarily of Wolisho and Dega, two varieties closely associated with the extraordinary genetic diversity of Ethiopian coffee. After ripe cherries arrive at the station, they are carefully sorted and processed using a traditional washed method before the parchment is dried.

Worka Chelbesa is an expression of both place and collective production. Rather than coming from a single estate, the lot represents the work of hundreds of small farms whose coffee is brought together through the washing station. The combination of extraordinary elevation, diverse plant genetics, a remarkable growing environment, and careful processing has helped establish Chelbesa as one of the most recognized coffee-producing communities within Gedeb.