Niguse Nara is the lead farmer in his village in Bensa, where he farms coffee together with avocado and other fruit trees on semi-forested plots between 1,950-2350MASL.

Like a lot of Ethiopian coffee producers, Niguse is experimenting with post-harvest processing to satisfy the specialty coffee market. He’s opted to use an anaerobic natural process with an extended fermentation to bring out prominent candy-like blueberry and peach flavour with a super perfumed nose. The hand-picked cherries were sorted and placed into sealed bags for 56 hours before being dried under shade for up to 4 weeks.

After processing, the coffee is transported to the dry mill in Alem Gena, where it is hulled, graded and sorted ready for onward transport to roasters like Fika.