This Ethiopian coffee from Big Sur Coffee is like visiting a pastry shop where they’ve just unwrapped some mandarin candies and sliced up fresh peaches. Their sweet-and-sour notes are accompanied by a floral aroma, lemon, and a light hint of bergamot. The distinctive citrus freshness brings vibrancy to every sip and invites you to keep tasting, allowing you to explore the interplay of fruity notes and floral aromas.
The coffee’s home is the village of Deri in the mountainous Guji Hambela region, from where small-scale farmers supply cherries to the Faysel Abdosh station. The station belongs to the Testi company and bears the name of its founder. This family-owned company emphasizes quality and long-term partnerships, paying close attention to bean sorting. For the 2025/2026 season, the station is introducing Testi’s latest project, drawing on sixteen years of experience with specialty coffee.
The process is based on washed processing with double fermentation. Whole cherries first spend 24 hours submerged in sealed tanks with control valves, where anaerobic fermentation takes place until a pH of 4.3 is reached. After the pulp is removed, the cherries spend another 24 hours in cold water, during which the pH drops to 4.0. During fermentation, microorganisms break down available sugars and produce, among other things, organic acids. These acids alter the acidity of the environment, which is expressed by the pH value; monitoring this value therefore helps assess the progress of the entire process. Fermentation conditions influence the activity of microorganisms as well as the formation of aromatic compounds, and can thus affect the final character of the coffee. In washed processing, this process also helps break down the mucilage layer that remains on the surface of the beans after the pulp is removed and which must be removed before drying.
- Altitude: 2,350–2,4000 m above sea level
- Harvest: 2025 through January 2026
- Lot designation: Faysel Abdosh Project 2