Illubabor 1974

Dimma

Gesha Village is located only around 20 km from the Gori Gesha forest, where the hallowed varietal of the same name was first isolated by British researchers in 1931. When preparing Gesha Village, the team behind the project trekked into the forest and gathered seeds from the wild coffee trees growing there, selecting individual strains of Geisha to cultivate on their own land. This lot is made up of another varietal selected from those same forests, on an earlier expedition in 1974.

This selection was made by the Jimma Agricultural Research Centre, and focused on finding a strain that had a high level of disease resistance and good yields, while retaining very high quality in the cup. While lacking some of the overtly floral character of a true Geisha, Illubabor 1974 closely resembles the cup profile of mixed Ethiopian Heirloom coffees, with clean bergamot often found alongside soft stone fruit and tea-like notes. To create this lot, Illubabor Forest cherries were harvested from the Dimma plot of the farm, located at over 2000 metres above sea level, before processing using anoxic fermentation. Full cherries were placed in the same GrainPro bags that coffee is often shipped in, and placed under a plastic cover to protect from sunlight. These thick plastic bags are impermeable to water and oxygen, so when they are sealed and the cherries begin to ferment, the bags expand as carbon dioxide is produced. After 84 hours of fermentation, the cherries were dried using raised African beds in very thin layers, so almost no fermentation is allowed to occur on the beds.

This adds a heavy complexity to the floral notes brought by the isolated heirloom varietal, reminiscent of blueberry yoghurt and dark chocolate.