Light Roast
$24.00 | 12 oz
This exceptional, natural sundried coffee comes from 35 producers in the small village of Okolu in East Guji, Ethiopia. Dambi Udo Agro Industry, a family-owned coffee business, has worked closely with producers in this region since 2018 to produce stunning coffee. The group has improved quality by establishing meticulous coffee sorting and drying protocols at their centralized processing site. Okolu shines with its notes of blueberry, blood orange, and milk chocolate.
Dominantly 74110 & 74112
Natural Sundried
2,000–2,178 meters
Through late-October 2022
In 2017, after spending several years in mining and local coffee supplying businesses, Ture Waji, Egata Alata, and Fedhesa Wedesa decided to create a coffee production, processing, and export business. They named the company–Dambi Udo Agro Industry PLC–after one of the major coffee growing villages in Odo Shakiso County.
The company first launched in 2018 through the establishment of a natural coffee processing site with a dry coffee milling machine in Suke Quto village. Soon after, the company established an 80 hectare coffee farm in the town of Dambi Udo. In addition to working with their own coffees, the company purchases ripe cherries from “outgrowers” in the surrounding areas, and processes them to their meticulously high standards. There are 221 smallholder coffee farmers from four villages (Dambi Udo, Hangadhi, Suke Quto and Sawana) who are registered as outgrowers to supply coffee cherries to Dambi Udo Agro Industry. All of these areas have mostly semi-forest coffee production systems and farmers generally grow both Guji local landrace and improved coffee varieties. As in years past, a group of 35 smallholder coffee farmers from Okolu, a sub-village of Dambi Udo, supplied the coffee cherries for this lot.
Farmers from Okolu village deliver hand-picked coffee cherries directly from their farms to the dry coffee processing site in Suke Quto. Upon delivery, underripe, overripe, and pest-damaged coffee cherries are sorted out by hand. Only the perfectly ripe cherries make their way onto the raised drying beds, where they dry in the sun for 18 to 21 days. To maintain uniform drying, the coffee is manually turned on the beds six times per day. The cherries are then covered with nylon mesh and plastic overnight to avoid pests and rehydration from dew. Workers begin carefully monitoring the cherry's moisture loss after 15 days and pull dried cherries off the beds when they reach a moisture level between 9.5 and 10.5 percent. There are a multitude of factors that impact the quality of the coffee cherries themselves, including variety, soil quality, rainfall, etc. But the main driver of Okolu’s fruit complexity is this natural processing technique, which results in layers of blueberry, blood orange and milk chocolate.
