With perfume-like florals and flavors of nectarine and mango, this lot from the beloved Guji zone is produced by Kalacha Gudina, a small but historic cooperative first founded in the 1990s and now part of the greater Oromia Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, the largest unionization of coffees farmers in Ethiopia.
Brief History & Flavor Profile
Ethiopia’s Guji zone is a distant and heavily forested swath of land stretching southeast through the lower corner of the massive Oromia region. Guji is heavy with primary forest thanks to the Guji tribe, a part of Ethiopia’s vast and diverse Oromo nation, who have for generations organized and legislated to reduce mining and logging outfits in their area, in a struggle to conserve the land’s sacred canopy. Compared to other coffee-heavy regions, large parts of Guji feel like prehistoric backwoods. Coffee farms in many parts of Guji begin at 2000 meters in elevation and tend to climb from there. The highland farming communities in this part of the country can be at turns Edenic in their natural purity, and startlingly remote.
Guji’s coffees, when well-produced, are often juicier and jammier in balance than nearby Yirgacheffe, which is known for more floral or herbaceous and lemony coffees. Clear stone fruit juice and candy-like acids structures are hallmarks of washed coffee from this area.
Tasting notes: Lemon, stone fruit, berries, citrus blossom, candy-sweet
