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For the past decade, on my trips to Ethiopia, I’ve stayed right near Dugo in the town of Bule Hora many times, but I’ve never stopped there because I didn’t know of any wet mills there producing top quality. In 2019, that changed when Fitsum Amde built his wet mill near the small town of Gerba just down the hill from Dugo. Fitsum cut his teeth in coffee processing for 8 years working near Gerba and northeast in the Kercha district, gaining the experience necessary to run a quality operation.
When I first tasted this coffee it was nice, but I found the smaller bean size performed better than the larger ones. It’s for this reason that we decided to screen out the larger beans and only use “Screen 14”. This refers to a specific size of raw coffee. Think of a plate with holes in it, at one particular hole size, to only allow beans of that size to pass through. Why does that matter? Well, it almost certainly separates the coffee by variety, focusing on the medium size Dega beans (Wolisho tend to be larger than Dega).
One of the advantages of working directly with my amazing friend Abenezer from Origin Land is that you can request such things as the time of milling. In our view, it elevates this coffee by a point, focusing the flavors and amping up the sweetness.
I was delighted to return to Ethiopia in January 2023 after three years away. It was perhaps my most memorable trip, as I had missed all of my friends and colleagues. I was also greatly concerned about their well-being.
Ethiopia faced Covid, like everyone else, but on top of that, there was a civil war in the north of the country. It was truly awe-inspiring to see how everyone I ran into in Ethiopia had handled both, adapting to these challenges and focusing on progressing quality and building their businesses. The reality is that volatility is the baseline of normal in Ethiopia, and perhaps this equips them better than the rest of us to handle it!
This green coffee was frozen immediately upon arrival.
- Phil
