The Coffee:

Site: Danche, Gedeb woreda, Gedeo Zone

Region: Yirgacheffe

Processing: Washed

Varietal: 74110, 74112

Elevation: 2,200 masl

Tasting: Lemon, Cherry Candy, Floral

The Site: Danche

Danche is a cherry collection and processing site in Gedeb woreda, Gedeo Zone, inside the area that sells as Yirgacheffe. Yirgacheffe is a market name rather than an administrative one. It covers Gedeb, Yirgachefe proper, Kochere and Wenago, so a coffee can carry the name while sitting an hour's drive from the town.

At 2,200 meters this is near the practical ceiling for arabica in Ethiopia. Cherry ripens slowly up here. The seed stays on the tree longer, accumulates more sugar and more acid, and comes off denser than the same variety grown a few hundred meters lower. The lemon in this cup is that altitude showing up as structure.

Why this coffee can carry a name at all

Until 2017, nearly all Ethiopian coffee moved through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, and the ECX pooled lots by region and grade inside its warehouses. Traceability stopped at the woreda. You could buy Yirgacheffe Grade 1. You could not buy one washing station's work.

Proclamations 1050 and 1051 of 2017 ended that. Blending at the warehouse level stopped, every lot on the exchange now carries labeling down to the washing station, and licensed exporters can sell direct within three days of warehousing in Addis. A single-site lot like this one became a legal product in 2018 and not before.

On the process

Washed processing at a Gedeo site is a sequence refined over decades, and it leaves almost nowhere to hide a mistake.

Cherry gets floated on delivery. Ripe fruit sinks; underripe and insect-damaged fruit floats off the top. What sinks goes through a disc pulper that strips skin and most of the mucilage. Fermentation happens in tile or concrete tanks, and published times across Gedeb sites range from 24 to 96 hours depending on whether the station ferments submerged or dry. The parchment then runs through washing channels where density does the grading: heaviest beans settle first, lighter ones get carried further down the channel. Some sites add a 12 to 24 hour soak after washing to build sweetness.

Drying is on raised beds, 10 to 15 days, hand-turned and hand-sorted, down to 10 to 12 percent moisture.

Cherry candy is what clean washed processing on high-grown 74-series tastes like when nothing goes wrong at any of those steps.

On the varieties: 74110 and 74112

These are collection numbers, not names, and the history behind them is worth knowing.

Coffee berry disease tore through Ethiopian plantings in the 1960s. The Jimma Agricultural Research Center went looking for resistance in wild forest coffee, and in 1974 collected material from trees near Bishari village in the Metu area of Illubabor, in the west of the country. The selections that survived screening were released in 1979 under their collection numbers. 74110 and 74112 are two of them.

Both are compact trees with small leaves, small cherries and small beans, which suits the dense agroforestry planting Gedeo depends on given how little land each household holds. 74112 carries broader genetic diversity and polygenic resistance rather than a single resistance gene, and performs well above 2,000 meters. 74110 is known for high acidity with unusually low tannin, which reads in the cup as brightness without astringency.

Note the geography: both varieties trace to wild trees roughly 500 kilometers west of here. They dominate Gedeo plantings because JARC and the regional agriculture offices distributed them, not because they originated here. Most coffee sold as Ethiopian heirloom is in fact a 1970s research selection.

The Importer:

Falcon Coffees

Falcon is a specialty green trader founded in 2008 and headquartered in Lewes, England, sourcing from roughly 550,000 smallholder producers across 26 origins.

They opened an Addis Ababa office in 2018, the same year the traceability reforms took effect, and run a seven-person team there with an in-house cupping lab and a staff agronomist. In 2021 they imported over 6,000 metric tons of Ethiopian coffee, around a fifth of their global volume. Ethiopia is not a side origin for them.