New Release: Oh! Coffee Limu, Ethiopia
It seems like it was no time at all since we introduced you to our two inaugural Oh! Coffees and here we are just eight weeks later ready to introduce our next exclusive Oh! Coffee!
One of the things we loved most about our aerobic and white honey Costa Ricans was that they were not only exceptional coffees but they came with an equally exceptional story (a story you can read here!) As we cupped different options for our next coffee as a team, we were very aware that we had set the bar high and we can confidently say, our next coffee will not disappoint!
The latest addition to the Oh! Coffee line up is a fully washed Ethiopian, grown in the south-western region of Limu. Coffees grown in Limu, in particular washed coffees, are considered to be some of Ethiopia’s best highland grown coffees and showcase those distinctive citrus and floral notes typical to coffees grown at high altitude.
ETHIOPIA
Ethiopia is widely hailed as the birthplace of coffee. While Yemen was the first country to grow coffee as a crop and Suden the first place to identify arabica coffee plants, it is Ethiopia where coffee was first consumed by humans (albeit as a fruit rather than a drink!)
If you read our previous blog on coffee growing in Costa Rica, you will remember we awarded the country “best named government department” for its Institute for the Defence of Coffee. While Ethiopia cannot compete with a name of that intensity, it did establish a similar National Coffee Board in the late 1950s to introduce a new way of grading the country’s coffee harvests.
One of the most significant developments in recent years was the introduction of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) in 2008 which brought both positives and negatives. Farmers get paid sooner than before and contracts are much more transparent which are important positives but an unfortunate result, especially for specialty coffee buyers, was that all coffee received by the ECX was commoditised and put into collective regional lots; coffees could be bought by region rather than by farm and producer rendering it virtually impossible to trace.
Opportunities to trade outside the ECX have increased over the last number of years making Ethiopian coffees much easier to trace. The influence of the ECX still remains in trading this way and unlike other coffee growing countries, it is typical of Ethiopia to locate coffees back to specific cooperatives rather than a larger, single estate.
OH! COFFEE
As we’ve already said, this coffee hails from the mountainous Limu region and was processed at a community site called Cheka Labu. The coffee lot is made up of native heirloom varieties from local smallholders who grow cherries in their gardens for local processing stations. This ‘back garden’ production system is an extremely popular model in Ethiopian production.
The coffee cups just as you would expect a high altitude, washed Ethiopian to with a vibrant peach acidity, lemongrass florals and green tea body, and will be our new house espresso at all three locations.
We hope you enjoy it as much as we do and can't wait to see you soon!