Worka Sakaro

This coffee comes from the Gedeb District in the highly-coveted Gedeo zone of Ethiopia. Gedeb is a remote area known to produce some of the world’s most beautifully crisp and floral washed coffees. Four hundred and ten smallholder farmers contribute coffee cherry to the Worka Sakaro Washing Station which is named for the municipality where it s located. The washing station was started in 2011 by Mijane Woresa who sold his coffee through the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) until 2017 when he secured an export license for himself. Today, his son Daneil Mijane runs the washing station with a detailed focus on quality. The Mijane family works closely with farmers (whose farm sizes range from 1 to 10 hectares), providing harvest trainings and establishing seasonal cherry collection sites to reduce overland travel for farmers and provide a quality inspection point. Coffee is not admitted to the washing station until it has been inspected for uniform ripeness and overall quality. It is then depulped, fermented for around 48 hours, washed and then dried in the shade until it is no longer wet to the touch. It is then moved to raised drying beds where it is continuously rotated and aerated for one week (as well as covered during the hottest hours of the day.) As a terrior, the Gedeo zone is considered a benchmark for elegant and complex arabica coffees and the smaller Gedeb district has achieved a sort of sub-label all of its own thanks to an increase in quality-focused farmers and independent processors like the Mijane family. This coffee in particular is complex and elegantly sweet with tasting notes of meyer lemon, hibiscus, cane sugar, toffee and honey.