AFRICA
Ethiopia Sidamo - Fair Trade and Organic - Grade 2
Ethiopia Sidamo - Fair Trade and Organic - Grade 2
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Sidamo enjoys soil and climatic conditions-including altitude, rainfall, and temperature - which makes it perfect for the production of delicious Arabica Coffee. Specialty-grade coffee from Sidamo is grown mainly in small villages (kebeles).
Sidamo is well known for its production of "garden coffee". The coffee is planted at low density, ranging from 1000 to 1800 trees per hectare, and is mostly fertilized with organic matter.
Fresh and clean cherries arrive at washing stations where they are pulped and allowed to ferment naturally. The fermented coffee is washed with clean running water, soaked in clean water, and then dried till it retains about 11.5 percent moisture.
Cupping Notes: Nice sweetness, lemon, lime, berries, apricot.
• Growing Altitude: 1,500 - 2,200 meters above sea level
• Harvest Period: November - January
• Variety: Ethiopia Heirloom Varieties
• Process: Washed, Sun Dried
• Region: Sidamo
Coffee is ancient in Ethiopia, but coffee farming is not. By the end of the 9th Century coffee was actively being cultivated in Ethiopia as food, but probably not as a beverage. It was the Arab world that developed brewing. Even as coffee became an export for Ethiopia in the late 1800’s, Ethiopian coffee was the result of gathering rather than agricultural practices. A hundred years ago, plantations, mostly in Harar, were still the exception, while “Kaffa” coffee from the southwest was still harvested wild.
In 1935, William Ukers wrote: “Wild coffee is also known as Kaffa coffee, from one of the districts where it grows most abundantly in a state of nature. The trees grow in such profusion
that the possible supply, at a minimum of labor in gathering, is practically unlimited. It is said that in south-western Abyssinia there are immense forests of it that have never been encroached upon except at the outskirts.”
