Ethiopia Kinjo *New*

The Kinjo washing station is located in Deretu and operated by Lato Agro. The site receives cherry from 650 individual smallholders, each averaging 1-2 hectares apiece of farmland. On these farms coffee typically shares the land with enset—a fruit-less relative of the banana tree whose pulp is scraped and packed into cakes, fermented underground, and then toasted as kocho, a staple starch in the area.

Washed coffee at Kinjo is processed simply and with great attention to detail: fresh-picked cherry is delivered each day by contributing farmers and hand-sorted upon arrival for uniformity and ripeness. Once sorting is complete, cherry is weighed and logged, and then depulped and fermented overnight in fresh water, rinsed again with fresh water the next morning, and taken directly to raised beds to dry, a process that typically takes 15-18 days. During the drying period the coffee is constantly rotated during the day and covered at night to prevent the area’s humidity from settling on the coffee's brittle parchment. Fully dried parchment is transported to Addis Ababa for final milling and export.

Our roaster Kylie was able to travel with Royal to Addis Ababa last spring to select this lot, please enjoy this beauty of a coffee.