We're starting off our fresh-crop Ethiopian selections with Bookkisa, a beautiful and clean natural community lot from Ture Waji's Sookoo. This is now our fifth season working with Ture's coffee. Ture's company, Sookoo, owns and operates quite a few stations spread out across Guji. This particular lot comes from their Dambi Uddo drying station, and is named after and located in the Bookkisa sub-kebele, in Swana, Shakiso. This is a classic Sookoo natural, full of sweet, ripe berries, round sweetness, delicate florals, and impeccable clarity!

The Dambi Uddo drying station buys cherry from roughly 100 small-holder farmers. While the norm in Latin America is for farmers to own many hectares with thousands of coffee trees, in Ethiopia, most growers are small landholders often harvesting coffee in their gardens, alongside crops for family consumption. The average farm size is 2.5 hectares. While this is actually larger than the average farm size in Colombia, planting is much less dense and nearly all of the production happens within a fully or semi-forested system. This means that there is much lower yield per tree and many fewer trees per hectare. All of the cherry that is delivered to Dambi Uddo is fully organic. The cherry is separated by sub-kebele upon delivery.