This silky, floral light roast opens with aromas of honeysuckle, raspberry, and cane sugar. Notes of coriander and more raspberry in the cup accompany delicate white peach sweetness, with orange pekoe tea and a hint of nutmeg emerging in the finish.

Details

Producer: Neja Fadil Wet Mill
Farm: Smallholders
Region: Guji Zone
Altitude: 7,054 feet | 2,150 masl
Varietal: Heirloom
Process: Washed
Roast: Light
Notes: Raspberry, Coriander, Orange Pekoe 

The Story

We first offered a natural-process lot from Neja Fadil last year, and we're very excited to welcome his coffee back to our lineup!

Mr. Neja Fedil is a recent arrival to coffee export, having built his washing station in 2017 after working for several years as a coffee collector on commission for other washing stations. The Neja Fadil wet mill in Tobitu Tuta Kebele has registered about 250 farmers from the surrounding villages so far. As is becoming increasingly common at private washing stations in Ethiopia, the station is expanding registration of farmer suppliers and launching agronomy training to expand quality control to the farm level.

The Special Process

This exclusive lot is the result of an experiment undertaken by Neja Fadil and Crop to Cup importers. They designed a special drying process protocol intended to stabilize water activity and moisture content in a more consistent and repeatable manner. (Water activity is the amount of water available for chemical reactions in a substance. In the case of green coffee, less is better in order to maintain quality in storage. Moisture content is simply the amount of water as a percentage of total weight.)

Here are more details from Crop to Cup:

"When the coffee is first starting to dry we isolate a sample and ensure that it is isolated throughout the whole process. With the assumption that 45% of the weight is moisture (if we are working with wet parchment) we can calculate sample moisture weight and dry matter weight.

"Let’s say we use 1KG sample size: 450g is water and 550g is dry matter. Then we know that when the coffee is dried to 10% moisture content, the following is true: 550g dry matter + 100g of water weight = 650g total weight. Thus, when the coffee weighs 650g we assume that it is 10% moisture content.

"Now, we can check the moisture content at this point. Let’s say we find that it is actually 10.5, then we can work backward to find the starting moisture content:

- Step 1: Weigh dried sample

- Step 2: Subtract weight of moisture (105g, since it was 10.5% moisture) from total weight and deduce dried matter weight.

- Step 3: Subtract this amount from 1KG (starting weight of sample), giving you starting moisture content percentage."