Cupping notes: dried apricot, honeysuckle, milk chocolate. Smattering of subtle stone fruit flavors like peach and apricot pair nicely with a cinnamon and honey and nut butter sweetness. Light melon and cantaloupe accents match a whisper of florality for a final flourish. It’s not a screamer, but it is a very sweet coffee with a lot of subtle complexity. The washing station at hafursa waro, operated by tracon, has “12 standardized fermentation tanks… and more than 160 drying beds [with] their own codes. By using this number we can control and track the processing status.” for this lot, hafursa waro have employed a technique quite similar to what central American farms have been calling honey process. Using minimal water for pulping, the coffee is neither washed nor pile fermented, but simply taken directly from the depulper to the drying tables, where workers regularly and actively turn the coffee to ensure it dries evenly. For this reason, we’ve elected to dub the lot “tej” processed, a play on the naming convention. In ethiopia, tej is a very local, very common sweet and sour libation not unlike mead, created by fermenting honey then aging and adding herbs and spices. We felt this was appropriate nomenclature, given the unconventional processing method and nod to a distinctly ethiopian product. Hafursa waro is located within the yirgacheffe district, in gedeo. We see so many coffees from gedeo (the larger “zone”) labelled yirgacheffe, it can get a little confusing disambiguating. Part of the reason for this is that gedeo’s cooperative union operates under the name yirgacheffe (ycfcu)… but technically speaking yirgacheffe woreda (district or town) is just one of many such localized districts within gedeo. Another reason for the popularity of using yirgacheffe in coffee nomenclature is the town’s unique history in ethiopian coffee production. Per tracon, “wet processing was introduced into ethiopian in the 1970’s, and yirgacheffe was the location of the very first wet processing mill.” perhaps one of the reasons the woreda was chosen for this was the relative abundance of local water sources — loosely translated, yirgacheffe could be rendered “water town.” the irony, of course, is that this coffee is processed using minimal water. Regardless, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable and very unique coffee you’d be remiss not to try. Origin information grower: smallholder farmers organized around tracon's hafursa waro washing station variety: indigenous landraces & selections region: hafursa waro kebele, yirgacheffe woreda, gedeo zone, snnp region, ethiopia harvest: november 2018 - january 2019 altitude: 1886 - 1900 masl (at the washing station) soil: vertisol process: "Tej" or "Honey" process - pulped and dried in the sun on elevated tables.