GOTITI

Description

Banko Gotiti is a washing station in the Gedeb woreda of Gedeo, in the hills the trade still calls Yirgacheffe. It stands on a ridge east of Gedeb town and buys cherry from the smallholders farming around it. What grows there are coffee gardens rather than farms, most of them a hectare or two, planted beneath false banana and shade trees and worked without chemicals because nobody here ever started using them. Everything sits high, roughly 1950-2150 masl, so the cherry ripens slowly and comes in dense. It is picked ripe, delivered the same day, pulped and fermented in tank, washed clean and then laid out on raised beds for about two weeks, turned by hand and covered through the hottest part of the afternoon. The varieties are the local landraces that grow all across Gedeo, a mix nobody has ever fully catalogued. In the cup we find lemon zest and raspberry, white blossom in the aroma, white pomelo through the middle, and honey sweetness holding it all together.