Ethiopia - Koke - CM Natural - Indigo #1222

When you visit a coffee farm, you expect to see lush coffee trees with a lot of leaves, all planted in neat rows for maximum efficiency, and well pruned for increased yields. But should you visit the forest in Koke, you might find your jaw drop, just a little. The trees are lanky, they’re thin and have several trunks extending from the ground. They are not so much planted as much as they grow wherever they choose to spawn from the earth.

This was the visual definition of wild coffee: natural mutations of Arabica trees that speckle the wild forest that grows dense and overhead around the hills surrounding the washing stations. Red dirt roads lead the way to raised drying beds that sit where the land allows it to be flat, while the sun beams down across the low humid, dry air, infusing the flavours of the cherry into the green bean, creating what we inevitably know will be incredibly delicious tasting coffees. Coffee grown from unpruned, unplanted, wild varietal trees

Here ripe cherries are picked and then sorted for any defects before processing begins. The cherries are placed in sealed tanks and filled with CO2, pushing oxygen out. They are fermented at cool temperatures for an extended time - giving this darker fruit note to the cup profile. They're then removed and dried in cherry, as a natural, for 20-30 days until around 11% moisture. The coffee is then sorted very thoroughly to give a clarity to this profile that is strongly present - unlike other wilder fermentations, this sorting pushes the direction of the profile uniformly. 

The images, and coffee descriptions here were provided by our partners at Project Origin, who we sourced this coffee with.