For those who love drinking coffee, there is always at least one African coffee bean among the coffees they have tried. Among them, Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee beans, produced in the birthplace of Arabica, are highly famous and loved by people for their excellent flavor. In recent years, domestic specialty coffee has developed rapidly. What are the variety, origin, and flavor of this coffee bean, which is very famous in the international coffee circle?

It is reported that on January 5, 2021, Luckin Coffee signed a strategic cooperation framework agreement with partners regarding the procurement of Ethiopian Yirgacheffe specialty coffee beans. According to the agreement, Luckin Coffee plans to purchase a total of 1,000 to 2,000 tons of specialty coffee beans annually from Ethiopia's Yirgacheffe producing region from 2021 to 2023. This agreement may become the largest specialty coffee procurement order by a Chinese company in Ethiopia.

Front Street Coffee focuses on two key terms. One is "specialty coffee beans," which means the quality of the coffee beans must reachSCAsystem80points or above (80points or below belongs to the commercial bean level). The second is "Yirgacheffe." As the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia treats coffee as an important cash crop. Many places across the country grow and produce coffee beans, and Yirgacheffe is only one very small producing region, yet it can provide more than one thousand tons of specialty coffee beans with quality above80points. One can imagine that Yirgacheffe's potential and the quality of coffee beans in this producing region are both extraordinary.

Many years ago, Yirgacheffe already became a coffee producing region that coffee lovers cannot avoid. Most independent coffee shops offer pour-over coffee from the Yirgacheffe region, and even now, Yirgacheffe is deeply loved by many veteran coffee enthusiasts. Front Street Coffee also very much likes the Yirgacheffe producing region, so today we will review and share Yirgacheffe's uniqueness and charm.

Yirgacheffe

Yirgacheffe

Yirgacheffe, "Yirgacheffe," is a small town in Ethiopia with an altitude of 1,700 to 2,100 meters. It can be said to be synonymous with Ethiopian specialty coffee. This place has been a wetland since ancient times. In the ancient language, "yirga" means "settle down," and "cheffe" means "wetland." Therefore, Yirgacheffe means "settle down and make a living in this wetland." 

At first, Yirgacheffe was a sub-region of the Sidamo Province in Ethiopia, located northwest of Sidamo, and is one of the highest-altitude coffee producing regions in Ethiopia. Because the production methods and flavors here were too outstanding, Ethiopian coffee farmers competed to take pride in their own coffee having Yirgacheffe flavor, so it became independent from the Sidamo producing region and became Africa's most famous producing region. (In the future, there will be more and more producing regions becoming independent due to flavor orientation.) .

Later, around 1995, Ethiopia changed its administrative divisions. The greatest impact on coffee regions was that the original Sidamo was divided into the new Sidamo (accounting for a small part of the original), while most was incorporated into Oromia. Yirgacheffe, which originally belonged to Sidamo Province, is now included in the new Gedeo Zone.

Among the Ethiopian coffee items currently circulating on the market, there will be a mixture of names based on new and old region names. Here we use the new administrative divisions as the standard.

Initially, Yirgacheffe's coffee trees were planted by European monastic scholars, and later this was changed to farmers or cooperatives.

Most coffee cultivation in Yirgacheffe belongs to the garden coffee model, that is, coffee farmers plant coffee trees near their living areas, harvest them themselves during the harvest season, and then send them to nearby processing plants built near water sources for unified processing (or they are uniformly purchased by middlemen).

Apart from a small number of relatively capable estates that independently grow, pick, and process green coffee beans themselves, coffee beans from many different areas and different cultivated varieties are centrally processed by processing plants and then sent to auction houses for official evaluation and grading.

This is also why many Yirgacheffe coffee beans are named and distinguished by processing plant or cooperative. For example, Yirgacheffe Gutingding comes from the Gutingding Cooperative.

Yirgacheffe varieties

Heirloom

Coffee varieties guide the power of coffee's final taste. Geisha mostly has a floral base, the Bourbon line has a nutty and citrus base,SL28&SL34is berry-like, and Yirgacheffe's flavor also comes from the coffee varieties planted there. You will find that Ethiopia mostly uses the names heirloom and landrace (Heirloom) to fill in the variety name. At the same time, most Ethiopian coffee beans that have not been manually sorted have the characteristic of obviously uneven sizes. Why is this phenomenon?

As the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia has an unimaginable number of coffee varieties. These complex varieties are mixed and planted. Combined with the mixed processing of the cooperative model mentioned above, it becomes more difficult to trace varieties. Therefore, "heirloom" is used as a blanket term to collectively refer to unrecognizable coffee varieties.

Ethiopian varieties can be roughly divided into landrace varieties and research varieties released by the Jimma Agricultural Research Center (JARC).

Both 74110 and 74158 are research varieties released by JARC. In the 1970s, the spread of Coffee Cherry Disease (CBD) caused a large-scale reduction in Ethiopian coffee production. In order to find varieties with natural disease resistance genes, JARC collected 639 sample varieties between 1973 and 1975, and finally selected 13 disease-resistant varieties, including 74110 and 74158, while 74 is the year they were collected.

The taste of Yirgacheffe

Flavor

Originally, the regional taste of Yirgacheffe mostly referred to washed heirloom varieties. They are fermented in water for 18 to 36 hours to remove pectin, and then placed to dry for 2 to 3 weeks. Yirgacheffe coffee processed this way reminds people of floral aromas, citrus, and berries. Among them, Front Street Coffee chose Gutingding as the representative washed Yirgacheffe to list.

Yirgacheffe's Gutingding Cooperative is located in the Worka producing area at the southeastern end of Yirgacheffe. It was originally part of the Worka Cooperative under the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers' Cooperative Union (YCFCU). Later, as more and more people valued the source of coffee beans, distinctive small producing areas were discovered one by one by coffee hunters around the world.

In 2012, Gutingding, with about 300 members, became independent from the Worka Cooperative and established the Gutingding Cooperative. Gutingding Village was the earliest village area to become independent. Many small farmers were also members of the original Worka Cooperative, so their coffee production techniques are naturally excellent.

This washed Yirgacheffe produced by the Gutingding Cooperative has citrus and black tea on the entry. As the temperature changes, it has cream, caramel, and almond in the finish, with obvious lingering sweetness and a clean, sweet taste.

In addition to washed coffee, the quality of naturally processed Yirgacheffe coffee is also gradually improving. The unclean flavors caused by rough natural processing in the old days are also slowly improving. For example, Front Street Coffee has a naturally processed Yirgacheffe from the Red Cherry Project.

As its name suggests, the Red Cherry Project requires coffee farmers to harvest only fully red coffee cherries, removing unripe cherries and overripe cherries, thereby reducing defective flavors in the coffee.

Harvesting only fully red cherries, combined with more meticulous natural processing, makes this naturally processed Yirgacheffe coffee smell of ripe fruit. On the entry, it has obvious fermented aroma and green grapes. As it cools slightly, there is lemon acidity and creamy smoothness, with a ripe grape juice-like quality in the finish.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.