ETHIOPIA | ABERA IRBATA DAGOMA - NATURAL

COE National Jury Selection is a Natural from Abera Irbata Dagoma in Gedeb District, Ethiopia.

Abera Irbata Dagoma’s coffee was a national jury selection at this year’s Cup of Excellence (COE) competition. Abera is a 39-year-old farmer with 12 children and only 4 years of experience cultivating coffee of his own. Abera was inspired for a long time by friends working in the coffee business, and at 35, he decided to purchase a farm of his own. Abera’s farm is 2 hectares and 100% planted with coffee. This natural process micro lot was handpicked and dried on raised beds on Abera’s property, carefully supervised, and sorted for the COE competition.

The world’s first Cup of Excellence competition took place in Brazil in 1999 and quickly became known as the world’s best discovery mechanism for quality. Each competition is origin-specific and involves multiple national selection rounds, a final competition with an international judging panel, and an online auction for the top 30 high-scoring submissions. All submissions are cupped blind throughout the entire competition, leaving judges only the cup quality to assess, and each submission is cupped up to five times. Winning producers are often fabulously rewarded with record-setting prices for their coffee, not to mention lifelong status for such an achievement. The competition has revealed countless innovative processing styles, rare cultivars, and obscure producing areas to the rest of the world for the first time.
Ethiopia is well-known for having an incredibly high-status quo for quality. Ironically, the COE has only been held here twice due to a lack of sponsorship and an established single-farmer marketplace. Royal has long supported maximum traceability in Ethiopia via whatever tools are available. This year, Royal Coffee is buying and importing the entire national selection round ourselves—all 22 top-scoring submissions that did not go to international auction. The enthusiasm of Ethiopia’s gifted smallholders means there are a lot of excellent coffees to be appreciated beyond the competition’s top 30 that go to auction. In the COE format, small growers typically submit fully processed and dried but un-milled lots of coffee, which are then centrally milled and stored during the auction’s multi-week procession. All national jury selects were purchased by Royal with a flat farmgate price of $4.50 per pound of green coffee directly to the farmers.

Gedeo zone is a dense and competitive highland zone in southern Ethiopia, known as “Yirgacheffe,” after its most famous central district. The zone has a history of beguilingly fragrant and effusive coffees, both fully washed (this was the first area of Ethiopia to pulp and ferment coffee) and naturals. Gedeb is one of 8 districts that make up Gedeo, but it has a terroir, history, and community all its own that merits unique designation in our eyes. Gedeb's municipality is a bustling outpost that links commerce between the Guji and Gedeo Zones. It contains an expansive network of processing stations that buy cherry from across zone borders. Coffee producers here would argue (and we would agree) that their coffee profiles are not exactly Yirgacheffe, or Guji, but something of their own. The communities surrounding Gedeb reach some of the highest growing elevations for coffee in the world and are a truly enchanting part of the local landscape. Coffees from this area, much closer to the Guji Zone than the rest of Yirgacheffe, can be some of the more explosive cup profiles we see anywhere in Ethiopia. Naturals tend to have perfume-like volatiles, and fully washed lots are often sparklingly clean and fruit candy-like in structure.