GUJI MEGADU. LOT25.13. ANAEROBIC. ÄTHIOPIEN.

GUJI MEGADU. LOT25.13. ANAEROBIC. ETHIOPIA. GUJI.

ESPRESSO portafilter / moka pot
FILTER COFFEE V60 / Aeropress / Orea / French Press

We taste:
STRAWBERRY JUICE.
SUGAR MELON.
VANILLA.
We taste: STRAWBERRY JUICE. SUGAR MELON. VANILLA.

Anaerobic processing, or fermentation without oxygen, gives Guji Megadu its exceptional fruit notes. A wonderfully fruity coffee that remains complex and transparent at the same time. 
Super funky as espresso, it's also excellent as a fruity, sweet, yet clear filter coffee.

Processing: anaerobic natural
Variety: 74112, 74110, Wild Guji Megadu
Growing altitude: 2000 - 2200 m

FOB: $ 8.57/lb
Importer: Falcon Coffees, DE

This year's harvest came early! In Guji, the harvest normally begins in December, but this year the cherries were ready to pick as early as November. This is a wonderful lot grown by Gash Sentayehu, and it has a very special story. A few years ago, Falcon Coffee began working with some farmers from the Guji region, including the two neighbors Gash Syoum and Gash Sentayehu. Though they are somewhat older, they both place great importance on quality and produce excellent coffee. Something else stood out: they treat the people on their farms kindly and show them great respect—something you don't often see in remote areas with difficult living conditions. So Falcon Coffee made a verbal agreement with them that they would continue buying their coffee cherries year after year if they continued growing their coffee this way.

In that first year, Falcon Coffee bought their coffee cherries and processed them anaerobically. Both Gash Syoum and Gash Sentayehu were interested in this method, so together they began to redesign the processing. Now, three years later, they handle the processing independently, and Falcon Coffee visits their farms several times a year. They produce absolutely impressive natural anaerobic lots on a larger scale, with quality improving year after year—as is demand for these lots!

It's a wonderful collaboration between two farmers from the region and Bette Buna, taking the cup profiles to a new level. The coffee is fermented anaerobically for 96 hours in sealed containers and then dried on African raised beds. After local dry milling to remove the husks, another round of hand sorting followed to remove any defects. The green coffee bags were then loaded onto a truck for the 3- to 5-day journey to BB's main dry mill in Gelan. There, the coffee cherries were cleaned again, screened by size and density, sorted by color, and finally packed into bags one last time.
Bette Buna literally means “house of coffee,” and the company is deeply rooted in the village. This began when Grandfather Syoum and Grandmother Emame asked Dawit and Hester to take over their farm—and the responsibility of building the Taferi Kela community. Since it was founded five years ago in Sidama, Bette Buna has also expanded its activities to Guji Megadu, where the company is working with local community leaders to implement the model in another region. Bette Buna maintains its own small model farm in Guji and works with local community leaders to improve processing on their growing lands as well. Megadu is part of the Shakisso Woreda in Guji and is one of the most remote communities in Guji. The region is very mountainous and densely forested. The soil is fertile and the potential for coffee cultivation is spectacular, making it one of the world's most extraordinary coffee-growing regions.

Coffee production in Ethiopia accounts for about one-third of the country's GDP, yet more than 90 percent of people working in the coffee industry do not earn a living wage. Bette Buna has made it its goal to change this in its community. They teach farmers in their community to improve their soil, restore agroforestry systems, and understand the importance of picking ripe cherries. Ripe cherries weigh more and produce better coffee, so farmers receive a higher price per weight as well as a quality premium. Perhaps most importantly, every year they distribute more than 350,000 healthy seedlings from their own nursery. These seedlings are climate-resilient varieties, and the farmers who plant them earn an average of at least $2 per year per seedling once the trees are fully grown. This means an economic impact in the region of more than $650,000 per year—in a region where the average household income is less than $50 per month, with an average family size of 9 people.
Bette Buna is an employer that promotes equal opportunity—a rarity in a culture where people with disabilities or limited capacity generally cannot find meaningful work. Its daycare center employs people with disabilities (especially deaf people), family members of people with disabilities, and other highly disadvantaged groups, such as single mothers who have difficulty finding work—especially those who make childcare available to working mothers in an agricultural society.
At Bette Buna, traceability is exceptional. For each lot, the people involved in each stage of production are specifically recorded and tracked—from the harvest workers to the employees who processed and milled the coffee. This level of transparency is virtually unprecedented in Ethiopia. We know not only that we're receiving exactly the same coffees we tasted before shipment, but also that the people who did the work receive fair wages—everyone involved adds value and is appreciated. These transparency measures also have the added benefit of already preparing Bette Buna for EUDR compliance.