This coffee's story

The Dambi Uddo drying station, high up in the hills of Shakiso, Guji, 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 personal/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. This lot is from the Shoondhisa sub-kebele within the Suke Quto kebele.

Processing

Sookoo Coffee, owned by Ture Waji, is rooted in the East Guji zone of Ethiopia, where around 100 smallholder farmers from the woredas of Shakiso, Uraga, and Haro Wolabo cultivate and deliver their coffee. What unites them is a shared dedication to quality: only fully ripened cherries are harvested and brought to Sookoo’s collection centers and drying stations. Harvesting at peak ripeness is essential, as the sweetest cherries yield beans with greater complexity, requiring precision, patience, and commitment from every farmer.At Sookoo, the focus lies entirely on natural processing.

Once delivered, the cherries are carefully sorted to remove under- and overripe fruit before being laid out on raised African beds. Here they dry slowly for 21 to 28 days, protected from unwanted fermentation. This meticulous approach ensures that their naturals are not only intensely fruit-forward, but also remarkably clean and crisp, avoiding the muddled flavors that often accompany less controlled processes.

The results are coffees with silky body and playful, juicy acidity. The cup reveals layers of raspberry, strawberry, pineapple, orange, cherry, lavender, coconut rum, brown sugar, milk chocolate, vanilla, sweet tea, and tropical fruits — a profile as vibrant and complex as the land itself. After drying, the beans are rested in jute bags for at least a month, a stage known in Amharic as mektet, which helps stabilize and deepen the final cup quality. They are then hulled, hand-sorted, and sent to Addis Ababa for final preparation. There, high-precision color sorters remove defective beans — from red and black to yellow or sour — while gravity separators ensure that only the densest, healthiest beans remain. Finally, the coffee is packed in jute bags lined with Ecotact or GrainPro liners, preserving freshness against moisture and external odors. Whether in 60 or 30 kg bags, each lot is carefully loaded into food-safe containers lined with kraft paper and transported to Djibouti, Ethiopia’s gateway port, before making its way to roasters and coffee lovers around the world.Through this collective effort — from farmers’ attention in the field to Sookoo’s rigorous processing — East Guji naturals reveal their true potential: exceptionally clean, fruit-driven coffees with clarity, depth, and unforgettable character.