Three weeks at the Yirgacheffe washing station. What we learned about water tables, drying-bed rotation, and which lots we'd cup at home.
Every spring one of us flies to origin. This year it was Ethiopia — three weeks moving between washing stations in the hills above the town of Yirgacheffe, cupping spoon in one hand, notebook in the other. We go partly to buy, but mostly to understand. A score on a sheet tells you a coffee is good; standing on the drying beds at 6am tells you why.
Water is everything
The first thing you notice at a washed-process station is the water. Cherries are floated to remove unripe and damaged fruit, depulped within hours of picking, then fermented in tanks before a long soak. The cleaner and colder the spring feeding those tanks, the cleaner the cup. At Aricha — the source of our Lot 47 — the water comes straight off the highlands, and you can taste it: a clarity that makes the blueberry note ring out instead of muddying into generic 'fruit'.
We spent a full day just mapping water tables with the station manager. When the dry season runs long, stations downstream get warmer, slower-moving water, and fermentation drifts. The lots we ended up buying all sat near the top of their respective catchments. It's not romantic, but it's the single biggest predictor of a clean cup we've found.
Drying-bed rotation
After fermentation, the parchment coffee dries on raised beds for up to two weeks. Sounds simple. It isn't. Beans on the sunny edge of a bed dry faster than beans in the shaded centre, and uneven drying shows up later as uneven roasting — some beans scorch while others stay underdeveloped. The best stations rake and rotate constantly, and cover the beds at midday when the sun is harshest.
“You can buy a great green coffee and roast it into mediocrity. You cannot roast a mediocre green coffee into greatness. The work at origin is most of the work.”
Notebook, day 9
What we brought home
We cupped more than forty lots and committed to three. Aricha Lot 47 was an easy yes — it's been a customer favourite two years running and the new harvest is, if anything, cleaner. We also picked up a tiny experimental natural lot we're still deciding how to roast, and a community-blend that may end up as the backbone of a seasonal espresso.
If you subscribe, you'll see Lot 47 land in rotation within a few weeks of the green arriving and clearing customs. That's the whole point of roasting weekly: the coffee you drink is days off the roaster and months — not years — off the tree.
