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Know your coffee: bogalech muda - gedeb, yirgacheffe, ethiopia
coffee from individual farmers are becoming less difficult to find in ethiopia, but they are still extremely rare & require a full supply chain in their support. every year there are a few new farmers available from just a handful of exporters devoted to making it happen. case in point: this is the very first time bogalech’s coffee has been exported under her own name.
after decades of growing coffee & selling to a large local coop, bogalech has begun working with konga trading plc, a small but highly specialized exporter based in central yirgacheffe and founded, fittingly, by the former executive director of the yirgaceffe coffee farmers cooperative union. so, despite being a debut coffee, there is a lot of experience behind it.
the vast majority of coffee processing in ethiopia is centralized due to complete lack of infrastructure or efficiencies at the farm level. larger plots like bogalech’s allow for greater personal control, & volumes large enough to be viable for exportation on their own. bogalech’s 12-hectacres in size, enormous compared to the average 1-hectacre or less belonging to most coffee producers in gedeb.
bogalech employs 6 pickers each harvest for cherry collection. cherry is delivered throughout the day during harvest, where it is inspected & sorted for acceptability based on ripeness & uniformity. once received, cherries are moved directly to the drying tables where they spread in a single layer to dry in the sun which takes about 3 full weeks. once the cherries have been thoroughly dried, rested & hulled, they are then transferred to the capital where Konga trading plc, dry-mills the coffee to a final product for export. we thank royal coffee for connecting the dots throughout this whole process so we can offer a single-farmer lot from ethiopia. through support of this process we will hopefully see more single farm lots from ethiopia in the future.