Ethiopia • Habtamu Danche
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- Lemon
- Cherry Candy
- Floral
OriginYirgacheffeEthiopia
Where a coffee grows sets what it can taste like before anyone touches it. Rainfall, soil, temperature swing between day and night, and which varieties survive locally are all fixed by the place. Two farms an hour apart can produce coffees you'd never guess were related.
Variety74110, 74112
Variety is the genetics, and it sets the ceiling. A Gesha grown well can do things a Castillo cannot, at the cost of yield and disease resistance. Most growers are choosing between a variety that tastes better and one that keeps the farm solvent, which is worth knowing when you see an unusual one on a bag.
ProcessWashed
Process is what happens to the cherry between picking and shipping, and after variety it's the largest single lever on flavor. It decides how much of the fruit reaches the seed and how much fermentation shapes the cup. It's also where the most intervention happens, which is what our processing character scale is measuring.
Elevation2,200 masl
Higher is colder, and cold slows ripening. Cherry that takes longer to mature builds more sugar and more acid, and the seed comes off the tree denser. That density is what survives roasting as brightness and structure. Above about 1,800 meters the tradeoff is yield, which is why high-grown coffee costs more.
Harvest2026
Green coffee is agricultural and it ages. A lot from the current harvest tastes brighter and more defined than the same coffee a year on, which fades toward flat and papery. The harvest year tells you how fresh the green was before we ever roasted it.
Imported byFalcon CoffeesLewes, England
Someone has to buy the lot, get it milled, containerized, shipped and cleared, and carry the cost in between. A good importer keeps a small lot separated instead of pooling it into a regional grade, which is the only reason a single farm's coffee ever reaches a roastery our size with its name still attached.
The Coffee:
Producer: Habtamu [CONFIRM FULL NAME WITH FALCON BEFORE PUBLISHING]
Site: Danche, Gedeb woreda, Gedeo Zone
Region: Yirgacheffe
Processing: Washed
Varietal: 74110, 74112
Elevation: 2,200 masl
Tasting: Lemon, Cherry Candy, Floral
The Site: Danche
Danche is a cherry collection and processing site in Gedeb woreda, Gedeo Zone, inside the area that sells as Yirgacheffe. Yirgacheffe is a market name rather than an administrative one. It covers Gedeb, Yirgachefe proper, Kochere and Wenago, so a coffee can carry the name while sitting an hour's drive from the town.
At 2,200 meters this is near the practical ceiling for arabica in Ethiopia. Cherry ripens slowly up here. The seed stays on the tree longer, accumulates more sugar and more acid, and comes off denser than the same variety grown a few hundred meters lower. The lemon in this cup is that altitude showing up as structure.
Why this coffee can carry a name at all
Until 2017, nearly all Ethiopian coffee moved through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, and the ECX pooled lots by region and grade inside its warehouses. Traceability stopped at the woreda. You could buy Yirgacheffe Grade 1. You could not buy one washing station's work.
Proclamations 1050 and 1051 of 2017 ended that. Blending at the warehouse level stopped, every lot on the exchange now carries labeling down to the washing station, and licensed exporters can sell direct within three days of warehousing in Addis. A single-site lot like this one became a legal product in 2018 and not before.
On the process
Washed processing at a Gedeo site is a sequence refined over decades, and it leaves almost nowhere to hide a mistake.
Cherry gets floated on delivery. Ripe fruit sinks; underripe and insect-damaged fruit floats off the top. What sinks goes through a disc pulper that strips skin and most of the mucilage. Fermentation happens in tile or concrete tanks, and published times across Gedeb sites range from 24 to 96 hours depending on whether the station ferments submerged or dry. The parchment then runs through washing channels where density does the grading: heaviest beans settle first, lighter ones get carried further down the channel. Some sites add a 12 to 24 hour soak after washing to build sweetness.
Drying is on raised beds, 10 to 15 days, hand-turned and hand-sorted, down to 10 to 12 percent moisture.
Cherry candy is what clean washed processing on high-grown 74-series tastes like when nothing goes wrong at any of those steps.
On the varieties: 74110 and 74112
These are collection numbers, not names, and the history behind them is worth knowing.
Coffee berry disease tore through Ethiopian plantings in the 1960s. The Jimma Agricultural Research Center went looking for resistance in wild forest coffee, and in 1974 collected material from trees near Bishari village in the Metu area of Illubabor, in the west of the country. The selections that survived screening were released in 1979 under their collection numbers. 74110 and 74112 are two of them.
Both are compact trees with small leaves, small cherries and small beans, which suits the dense agroforestry planting Gedeo depends on given how little land each household holds. 74112 carries broader genetic diversity and polygenic resistance rather than a single resistance gene, and performs well above 2,000 meters. 74110 is known for high acidity with unusually low tannin, which reads in the cup as brightness without astringency.
Note the geography: both varieties trace to wild trees roughly 500 kilometers west of here. They dominate Gedeo plantings because JARC and the regional agriculture offices distributed them, not because they originated here. Most coffee sold as Ethiopian heirloom is in fact a 1970s research selection.
The Importer:
Falcon Coffees
Falcon is a specialty green trader founded in 2008 and headquartered in Lewes, England, sourcing from roughly 550,000 smallholder producers across 26 origins.
They opened an Addis Ababa office in 2018, the same year the traceability reforms took effect, and run a seven-person team there with an in-house cupping lab and a staff agronomist. In 2021 they imported over 6,000 metric tons of Ethiopian coffee, around a fifth of their global volume. Ethiopia is not a side origin for them.
