Aricha
ETHIOPIA
The name of the Aricha washing station run by the Birhanu family may already be familiar to our long-time customers, as their natural-processed coffees have been featured by us several times. Our current lot from Aricha -which is a wet-processed one this time- is a light, refreshing, citrusy coffee, much like the season-opening Reko.
During harvest season, which spans from October to January, six to seven hundred families of smallholders choose to sell their crop to Aricha. The coffee cherries arriving at the station are sorted by hand, de-pulped and then placed in fermentation tanks for 36-48 hours, depending on the weather conditions, where wild yeast strains and bacteria characteristic of the environment take care of the fermentation. Then the coffee beans are being washed and graded in channels followed by drying 12-15 days on raised beds. Finally, the beans are transported to Addis Ababa, to BNT Coffee’s central warehouse, where the final hulling, sorting and export preparation takes place.