008 - Basha Bekele

FREEZER SALE UPDATE (11/26):

From Christopher: Perhaps the most contentious and controversial of our 2024 releases, this coffee offered an incredible lens into the challenges of working with smallholder microlots in a country without infrastructure equipped to efficiently mill or export them. As we noted during the original lot, when this lot arrived, as two 60kg sacks, one was punctured; upon cupping each bag separately, I discovered that they were quite different in the cup. In an effort to create a uniform experience, I roasted each bag separately and then blended them. This may have inadvertently created some (but not all) of the oddities that many—including me—observed in this coffee: incredible cup-to-cup and bag-to-bag variance. It's tempting to regret this choice as it's suboptimal from a customer experience standpoint—but I believe it's a living testament to the beautiful chaos of coffee as an organic, agricultural, heterogenous product. For the freezer sale, there was coffee from just one of the two bags remaining—the bag without a hole in its side, or as I've come to call it "the clean bag." Even using the same roast profile and color sorter settings (we removed 0.27% post-roast), the funkiness of the original release is quite restrained due to the lack of oxidation of the green coffee; instead of blueberry, we're presented with notes of persimmon, apricot, orange, jasmine, cherry and a slight note of sencha tea.

The third and final of our smallholder washed coffees from the 2024 harvest in the Southern highlands of Ethiopia comes from 2024 Cup of Excellence #1 winner Basha Bekele. Processed using a hand-pulper and a protocol devised by Christopher Feran, this coffee underwent a yeast-controlled fermentation. The resulting cup is complex and bright with notes of apricot, lime, kumquat and jasmine with a blueberry-cherry undertone.

From Christopher: "At this point, Basha Bekele needs no introduction; the top winner of the 2024 Cup of Excellence competition in Ethiopia has built a reputation for producing exceptionally high-quality dry processed coffees at his drying stations in Bensa—in Bombe, Kokose, Shantawane and, this year, Murago. I first met Basha in early 2019, but beginning in the 2023 harvest, through my work with Crop to Cup and alongside CoQua I began to collaborate more closely with Basha on post-harvest processing practices. Ahead of the 2024 harvest and his win in CoE, we focused our work on cherry sorting and selection, flotation and drying improvements—including implementing the use of shade across his drying stations.

"As with Mate Matiwos (AVIARY#007) and Bekele Belaychow (AVIARY#005), we also bought Basha a GEM hand pulper. With it, Basha produced two small lots for Crop to Cup: a white honey process (using the same protocol as Mate and Bekele) as well as this one—one using an inoculation of Lalcafe INTENSO yeast to control the fermentation.

"The use of yeast inoculation to control coffee fermentation is a technique I've been fascinated by for nearly a decade. While traditional 'spontaneous' fermentations often offer greater cup complexity, I've enjoyed the process control, predictability over outcomes, and improvements in shelf life gained by using yeast controlled fermentation as a tool.

"For this lot, I wanted to try to create a lot that tasted like kumquats—clean, focused citric acidity with sweetness to support it—and I believed using a yeast controlled fermentation would be the way to achieve it. Because Saccharomyces Cerevisae does not generate acidity (acidity being a byproduct of bacteria in coffee fermentations), we'd need to start with the appropriate genetics and growing conditions—such as those at Basha's farm of young 74158 plantings at soaring elevations of nearly 2300 meters in Bensa.

"The resulting 240kg of green coffee was split between Aviary and one other roaster; it came into Aviary's hands as a result of skittishness surrounding the shipping disruptions in the Red Sea leading to a contract cancelation. I was confident in the process, knowing how carefully controlled both the fermentation and drying process were—and happily contracted the available two bags while they were still awaiting departure at the port of Djibouti.

"And though perhaps I could attach a premium to this lot given its relative exclusivity and given Basha's ascendence through his win in the Cup of Excellence, by shipping via ocean rather than air, it reduced the cost of the lot relative to the others Aviary has offered from Ethiopia this year. Thus, I've decided to make it the most affordable of Aviary's releases to date.

"While this is not the highest-cupping coffee Basha produced this year—nor is it technically the highest-cupping coffee Aviary has roasted from Ethiopia in 2024—it's one of my favorites: a beautiful, clean, complex, acid-foward washed Southern Ethiopian profile presenting with notes of apricot, lime, jasmine and kumquat and undertones of blueberry that cools to cherry.

Read this blog post and this blog post to put this coffee into context.

This is a coffee with limited availability (~96kg) and is available both in 200g boxes and 1kg bags.

UPDATE 2024-09-21 from CF: During receipt of this coffee at Aviary's roastery, I discovered that one of the two bags had been punctured by one of the warehouses preceding the delivery. We don't know by whom, and we don't know when—but 8kg of coffee were lost. We have updated the available quantities to reflect this. I performed a physical and sensorial evaluation of each bag; the exposure to oxygen created differences between the two bags. To create a uniform experience for customers, we will be blending these two bags (post-roast). Tasting notes have been updated to reflect this development.