Bette Buna
Bette Buna means ‘the house of coffee’ in Amharic. And that’s what we like to be, a place like home where everyone involved in the coffee community has an equal opportunity to develop.
This lot is coming exclusively from our own farm, located in the woreda of Megadu. With an elevation of 1998 up to 2200 masl, we grow coffee with a team of fixed and seasonal value-adders. Our farm is divided into different plots of semi-forest and wild forest of a total of 220 hectares.
Despite Guji coffee is getting famous all over the world, it is only since 15 years that the Guji region is recognized as a separate coffee zone in Ethiopia.
East from the Ethiopian Rift Valley, you can find the Guji region, divided in Guji-West and Guji-East. Crossing small villages over rural gravel roads, interspersed with green mountain views make you mind escape.
If you take the gravel road from the city Shakiso to the direction of Reji, you will pass remote villages changed by green mountain tops with wild animals. After 30km you’ll pass the last small village and you continue the rough road deep into the original coffee forests. After an hour you reach our farm in the woreda of Megadu.
Surrounded by neighboring coffee farmers we grow pretty good coffee in our ‘coffee forest farm’ in plots with wild and semi-forest shielded coffee. Beside growing coffeewe produce – on a height of 6 meters tasty organic honey with flavors of coffee blossom.
A day at the farm
Together with a team full of motivated female seasonal pickers we harvest our red cherries by hand in day time. Because we grow coffee on a high altitude covered by natural shades, our harvest months are spread and more late compared to the West side of Ethiopia.
At the start of the evening the red cherries are collected from our day shift and sorted, measured and tagged by our station night shift. Early morning the cherries are processed by natural fermentation. After the right time of fermentation, the cherries are laid down on our raise beds to dry according to the desired cup profile. After the right moisture levels are reached, we store our cherries in shell or parchments in hermetic grain pro bags in our warehouses to rest.
As our farm is located in a remote place, we provide additional to a living wage also weekly transportation, housing and meals at our sites. Partners and children are welcome during the high season and follow sattelite education at our station.
Developing Opportunities
We developed a concept that embraces the complete coffee community in order to create opportunities. In short, that means that we go beyond the lifes of only the coffee farmers and also include youth, formal and informal institutes in the region. We believe that development is a holistic, community based process full of collaboration and needs this matching community approach as well.
Processing detail:
The coffee cherries of this lot were handpicked in the months of November and December 2023 by our team of 850 value adders. Collected from our semi-forest plots the ruby red cherries are systematically placed out our raise beds. There we dried this lot this year in 3,5 weeks time in half sun, half shadowed covered beds. After reaching the correct moisture the dried cherry (‘lulu’) were stored in our local warehouse.
Roasting details:
Ethiopian coffees are world famous for their floral aromas which we seek to preserve in the roast. As these aromatic compounds are easily lost at later stages of the roast we developed a light roast that still does justice to the sweetness of this coffee. The natural process brings out a decadent chocolate sweetness reminiscent of praliné which is beautifully complemented by tropical notes of orange, melon and delicate floral characteristics. This coffee is roasted in approximately twelve minutes to 201 degrees celsius with a development time of one minute and twenty seconds.
Brewing details:
This coffee is best enjoyed as a filter coffee. We recommend a brew ration of 1:16 to maintain balance between sweetness, acidity and body. For the adventurous baristas this coffee can be enjoyed as espresso. The light roast requires a fine grind, high temperature and is best enjoyed as a 'long espresso' with a ratio of up to 1:2.5.
