Story
Green Spring is from the Sonkolle Kallato kebele in Guji, Ethiopia, and represents a unique, expert-level processing collaboration between Ture Waji and Mike Mamo. This lot was bought from 35 local farmers and then dry processed on raised beds. Like much of the Guji Zone, this processing site is lushly verdant and encompasses a natural spring, but this coffee’s name also pays tribute to Green Spring, Maryland, where Mike grew up. We taste peach, strawberry, & red flowers in the cup.
This is the first Ethiopian coffee we’ve roasted in five years and we were inspired to support Mike and Ture’s vertically integrated model, providing unparalleled traceability to producers for the standards in this country. Both have other coffee businesses; Ture is the founder of Sookoo Coffee washing station, and Mike is Managing Director of the premier dry mill in Addis, Addis exporters, as well as an active partner in the US-based Osito Coffee (who we worked with on Fazenda Recreio). Because 15 million Ethiopians make a living from the coffee industry, and 90% of coffee is grown by smallholder farmers who sell their crop of ripe cherry at local washing stations either to private agents or cooperative unions, exporters like Mike and processing stations like Green Spring are a vital commercial link in the national supply chain, where traceable information is either transmitted or lost.
Ethiopia is the genetic birthplace of the Coffee Arabica species, which has been exported, grafted, and cultivated all over the world. There are supposedly up to 10,000 unique varieties growing in Ethiopia today. The two that make up Green Spring — Gibirinna 74110 and Serto 74112 — were wild forest tree selections developed in the mid-70s by JARC (Jimma Agricultural Research Center) for high-altitude cultivation and resistance to disease. The Guji Zone’s elevations range from 2,200 to 2,350 MASL (it’s the highest altitude coffee on our menu this year!), and temperatures spread from 10°C to 23°C, so the conditions support slow maturation of fruit and a long harvest period (typically between September and January), resulting in a complex, distinct flavour.
Located in the Oromia state, the Guji Zone is dually one of Ethiopia’s most dynamic and economically crucial coffee-producing regions and sadly the site of ongoing armed conflict that has lingered since the Tigray War “ended” in 2022. Guji’s agricultural communities have been disproportionately affected by frequent ethnic violence and insurgent attacks, leading to farming disruptions, destroyed infrastructure, restricted market access over safety concerns, increased food insecurity and schools and clinics consistently having to close. Yet while these difficult conditions do persist, changes made in 2017 to the restrictive, inefficient ECX public auction system (no longer in place) have led to more socioeconomic opportunity for farming communities, now able to sell directly to importers.
In all of this, Green Spring is perhaps a metaphor both for how inextricably linked coffee production is to the harsh geopolitical realities of life in this rural country, and for the hopeful optimism its most active participants bring to their impassioned development work. Mike and Ture’s harvest sourcing and dry processing on raised beds takes 3-4 weeks, giving a structured, expressive, fruit-forward sweetness with a clean finish. We bought ~1200kg and we can’t wait to share this with you.
