Proclamation of Impurity

Suitable for all brewing methods.

Producer

Smallholder farmers of Gedeb

Washing Station

Lalesa Washing Station

Region

Gedeb, Gedeo

Varietal

Heirloom

Black Honey

Altitude

Gedeb sits at the southern end of the Gedeo Zone, where the Ethiopian highlands fold into some of the most densely planted coffee ground on earth. The Gedeo system is agroforestry in its oldest form, coffee grown beneath enset and native shade on terraced smallholdings worked entirely by hand, a practice old enough and intact enough to have been inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape. Here the trees sit between 2,150 - 2,200 MASL. At that height the cherry matures across a long cool season, the cold of each night drawing the sweetness inward as the seed densifies. Altitude of this order is not a number for the label. It is the mechanism behind a Gedeo lot's acidity, its aromatic reach, and its ability to hold sweetness without ever turning heavy.

The cherry is grown by smallholder farmers across Gedeb and carried to Lalesa, a site established in 2023 by Ephtah Specialty Coffee. Ephtah is a women-led exporter founded by Wubit Bekele, built on the conviction that the coffee sector is where change in rural Ethiopia will be won. Women are prioritised into leadership and management, agricultural training is run for women farmers, and day care is provided for producers and staff so that the work and the household are not set against one another. Some of those delivering to Lalesa farm under the Ama Commitment, a scheme that pays them well above what the same cherry previously commanded. The established order is quietly overturned here, a devotion of its own, and the proof of it arrives in the cup.

Honey processing sits between washed and natural. The skin is stripped at the pulper, but the mucilage, the sugar-rich layer bound to the parchment, is left on the seed to dry. How much of it is left dictates the name. Black honey is the furthest extreme, nearly all of the mucilage retained, the beds built thick and the drying deliberately slowed under shade so that the sugars bleed inward and consecrate the seed rather than ferment away. It is the most unforgiving way to dry a coffee, days longer on the bed, the whole lot turned by hand around the clock, every defect culled before it can taint what sits beside it. At Lalesa the cherry is floated to strip underripes and insect damage, laid down on raised beds, and the green handpicked by women from the surrounding villages before it is ever bagged.

Harvest across Gedeo runs from the close of one year into the first months of the next, and this lot belongs to that single window. Once the parchment is dry it is rested, hulled and graded, hand sorted again at every stage before it is bagged for export. It is the same work the Gedeo smallholdings have carried out by hand for generations, on ground that has been held the same careful way for longer than most coffee histories run. What comes out of it is what one season on one site will give. Taken once, laid down in a quantity we can count, and not offered again.