Rocko Mountain #3 - Ethiopia

This is an Omni-roasted coffee which means it is roasted to highlight the flavour of the coffee and will work well in all brew methods.

Farm info

Rocko has been a firm favourite at Mistral for years and this year we have received a premium crop from the Rocko Mountain area. The taste is a classic natural Yirgacheffe coffee but the quality we have never experienced before and it is due to a growing understanding from the farmers to care more for the coffee cherries and the farming process.

Working in partnership with Addis Exporter, a business with more than 100 years experience in exporting high quality coffee from Ethiopia, we have been able to select an incredible natural processed coffee from smallholders based around the Rocko Mountain in the Haricha Woreda, Yirgacheffe. These smallholder farmers have hand-picked their cherries and sold them to a local trader who oversees the processing and sorting before selling the beans to the ECX who grade according to SCAA standards. Addis Exporter then purchase the top quality lots from the ECX and select the best for their ‘Rocko Mountain Reserve’.

Coffee in Ethiopia has been traded on the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange since 2008. The ECX was established to create an element of collective bargaining for farmers who are not members of cooperatives or owning large estates. Previously, only a third of all the agricultural products produced in Ethiopia reached the market due to the high costs and risks involved with trading. There was no assurance of product quality or quantity which meant buyers would only trade with suppliers they knew and trusted. This resulted in many of Ethiopia’s agricultural producers becoming isolated from the market, forcing them to sell their produce to the nearest buyer, sometimes a chain of multiple middlemen, and leaving them unable to negotiate on price or improve their market position.

With the introduction of the ECX, coffee exports in Ethiopia have become more regulated and centralized, enabling more smallholder producers to have access to the global market. Ninety per cent of all the coffee produced in Ethiopia now moves through the ECX where it is cupped and graded according to flavour profile and quality. Since its inception in 2008, the ECX claims to have introduced:

Market integrity - by guaranteeing the product grade and quantity and operating a system of daily clearing and settling of contracts.

Market efficiency - by operating a trading system where buyers and sellers can coordinate in a seamless way on the basis of standardized contracts.

Market transparency - by disseminating market information in real time to all market players.

This system seems to have been successful in giving more smallholders access to the market and can result in some really consistent stand out lots with incredible flavour profiles. The downside for the specialty buyer is the inability to access information about the precise origins of the coffee, and thus an inability to purchase from the same producers year after year.

Yirgacheffe is both a town and grade of coffee in Ethiopia. The town itself is located in the Gedeo zone in the Southern Nations and Nationalities Peoples Regional State (SNNPRS) in Southern Ethiopia. More than any other country, Ethiopia has a broad genetic diversity among its coffee varieties, with each type having distinctive taste, shape and colour. As a result, each region in the country can offer a different flavour profile, forming the grading system for Ethiopian coffees e.g. Sidamo, Harrar, Limu, Djimmah etc. It is widely argued that a Yirgacheffe grade coffee can offer one of the most distinctive flavour profiles in the world with pungent floral aroma and intense citrus flavour.

Processing in Yirgacheffe can take the form of both washed and natural, with most of the coffee growing at over 2000 metres above sea level. Much of the coffee grown in Ethiopia is done using traditional methods, under shade trees alongside other crops and without the use of chemicals. Coffee from Yirgacheffe is often referred to as ‘garden coffee’ as it is grown on very small plots, often in the back yard of small dwellings.