Natural Sidamo GujiCoffee Bean Intro:

Front Street Coffee: Natural Guji Alsie Coffee Beans

Country: Ethiopia

Region: Guji

Altitude: 1800-2100 meters

Process: Natural process

Variety: Local heirloom

Sidamo

Sidamo

The Sidamo region is located in southern Ethiopia, extending eastward to the Arsi and Bale administrative regions and westward to the Gamogofa administrative region. Coffee in Sidamo is cultivated at altitudes between 1400m and 2000m. The local economy is primarily agricultural, with the main coffee-growing areas situated around the Great Rift Valley. In recent years, Sidamo has developed rapidly and has become an important hub for coffee exports. The flavors of Sidamo coffee are highly diverse, with variations in soil types, microclimates, and countless native coffee varieties resulting in distinct characteristics for coffee produced in each town.

Among the most famous coffee-growing areas in Sidamo are Guji (GUji) and West Arsi (West Arsi). Most coffee beans in the Sidamo region are processed using the natural method. Front Street believes that the natural process gives Sidamo coffee beans a rich fruity aroma and smooth mouthfeel.

Guji

guji

The Guji region was once part of the Sidamo region. However, with the emergence of several outstanding Guji coffee beans, this region successfully "separated" and became the second independent region to break away from Sidamo after Yirgacheffe. It now enjoys an independent traceable identity in the ECX coffee trading center under its own name.

The Guji region is located southeast of Yirgacheffe and features complex terrain with high mountains, valleys, and plains. The area has fertile black soil (Vertisol) with a soil depth of nearly two meters and an average altitude of over 1800 meters. The significant diurnal temperature variation due to its geographical characteristics provides ideal terroir conditions for producing high-quality specialty coffee. When it comes to what made the Guji region famous, Front Street must mention the Huakui coffee bean.

The Huakui coffee bean comes from Hambella, located in the largest coffee-producing region of Ethiopia, Guji, and administratively belongs to the Oromia State. To the west, Hambella faces Yirgacheffe Kochere across the mountains, with a highland barrier about 30 kilometers wide and 3200 meters above sea level separating the two regions. It borders the Shakiso, Uraga, and Kercha sub-regions of Guji to the southeast, south, and north, respectively, making it the highest-altitude coffee sub-region in Ethiopia.

Currently, there are nearly 20 processing plants of various sizes in the Hambella region. In 2017, a natural lot from the "Buku Abel" processing plant of DW Company won the Ethiopia National Taste of Harvest Competition. Chinese green coffee importers named this lot Huakui, which at the time had a strong aroma of strawberries and cream. Subsequently, DW Company added processing plants in the core area of Hambella, Dimtu, namely "Buku Abel," "Buku Saysay," "Haro Soresa," and "Tirtiro Goye," with an annual coffee production of about 1100 tons. Among all these farms and processing facilities, strictly speaking, only the beans from the "Buku Abel" "processing plant's natural coffee beans can be called "Huakui coffee beans."

Qianjie Coffee has cupped Huakui, Huakui 2.0, and Huakui 3.0, and found that although Huakui 2.0 and 3.0 had flavors very close to the 2017 Huakui, their body and aftertaste fell short of the original 2017 Huakui. Surprisingly, however, Qianjie could sometimes still identify green beans identical to the original Huakui lot among these two batches of green beans. As for Huakui 3.1, Qianjie found its flavor far removed from Huakui, and even felt that Huakui 3.1's flavor was somewhat close to that of Geisha, a change we also confirmed with green coffee traders. In 2020, as the fourth year of this Huakui coffee, its production area had already expanded to several times its original size, and combined with more scientific cultivation and management, Huakui 4.0's flavor was even better, earning praise from a host of coffee enthusiasts. Qianjie also acquired and listed a Huakui 4.0 coffee.

West Arsi

West Arsi

West Arsi is located between the famous Yirgacheffe coffee-growing region and Hararge, at an altitude of 1900-2200m, in the western part of the Sidamo region. The name of this area comes from a branch of the Oromo people who have long lived here.

West Arsi is made up of three woredas (third-level administrative divisions of Ethiopia): Arsi, Bale, and East Shewa. About 88.52% of West Arsi's population is Oromo, which is very important in coffee history, because they were the first tribe in human history to drink coffee, and half of the coffee produced in Ethiopia comes from this region.

Natural process

Natural

During the coffee harvest season, farmers in the Sidamo region only pick ripe red coffee cherries, placing them one by one into baskets. The harvested coffee cherries are uniform in size, similar in ripeness, and free of other impurities. The first step in the processing involves manually sorting out defective coffee beans as well as unripe or overripe coffee cherries. The red coffee cherries are then spread out on elevated wooden frames or full pergolas for sun drying, which avoids the risk of the beans absorbing odors from the ground.

During the sun-drying process, the cherries are constantly turned to ensure even drying and uniform moisture loss. Every three to five days, farmers manually sort out defective or moldy cherries. Once the skins have dried and hardened, a hulling machine is used to remove the dry, hard skins. After obtaining the green coffee beans, farmers perform a final sorting to achieve the perfect flavor.