Description
Dumerso is a private processing station located just north of the town of Yirga Chefe, in the heart of the coveted Gedeo Zone—the narrow section of highland plateau dense with savvy farmers and fiercely competitive processors whose coffee is known the world over as “Yirgacheffe”. The Gedeo region is named after the Gedeo people who are indigenous to this area. As a coffee terroir, Yirgacheffe has for decades been considered a benchmark for beauty and complexity in arabica coffee—known for being beguilingly ornate and jasmine-like when fully washed, and seductively punchy and sweet when sundried–and hardly requires an introduction.
In Ethiopia, natural coffees, once fully dried, must be milled of their coffee husk prior to transport to Addis Ababa. This is for the purpose of storage efficiency—coffee simply takes up too much space as a whole dried fruit. Jemila is a dry mill who works with the Dumerso processing station, consolidating and prepping their finished coffees for transit to Addis, and export. This particular coffee is a blend of different natural lots from Dumerso throughout harvest.
Tasting Notes: Unlike its Grade. 1 cousins, this cup is much darker toned. Shines at a medium to dark roast and is full of complex chocolaty and tea like spice notes. Being natural processed, it does have some soft red fruit tones but they are mostly covered up by the tea like spice and more rustic chocolaty factor. One will be able to detect them in the aftertaste, otherwise they tend to pop out as the cup cools. Light to medium roasts can come off a bit earthy, the tea like spice is well defined but the chocolaty factor comes off pretty grassy at traditional light roasts. One really has to build up the chocolaty factor by progressing the roast closer to 2nd crack. Great for cold brew or blending at a nice medium roast, for a single origin drinker, we recommend fuller roasts.
Roasting Notes: Roasts surprisingly even for a grade 3 natural. We would avoid light/medium roasts. One does not have to torch this coffee by any means but getting closer to 2nd crack than first will be a good thing. Setup is very important if shooting a bit lighter, took 3-5 days for those strong tea like spice notes to mellow, bringing the fruitiness and complexities forward in the cup.
The Dumerso station is owned and operated by Dirshaye Ferenju and his family. Dumerso’s contributing farmers number over 800, and average about four acres of farmland each. Their naturals are floral and syrupy, the result of careful sorting and drying routines executed to perfection throughout the dramatic temperature fluctuations of Yirgacheffe’s unique high-elevation climate. It’s a tough business being a private miller, or processor, in Gedeo. The sheer density of competition among washing stations tends to push cherry prices as high as double throughout a single harvest, and privates often don’t have the backing of a larger union to secure financing, regulate cherry prices, or bring export costs down with centralized milling and marketing. Successful private millers like Jemila need to be not only standout quality service providers to stay afloat; they must also be excellent business developers with connections and community standing, in order to continue winning the business of processors and buyers alike, and stay afloat for the long term.
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