Yirgacheffe Chelchele

Ethiopia | Yirgacheffe Chelchele | Heirloom Washed Special Prep Grade 1

Discount applies automatically at checkout — mix & match any espresso roast.

This coffee’s roasted in our espresso style — but that doesn’t mean you need to brew it as espresso. You can make it however you like — espresso, filter, moka pot, AeroPress or whatever you enjoy. We roast it a touch darker than we would a filter roast to caramelise the sugars and bring out smooth chocolatey and nutty flavours that cut beautifully through milk.

When you add milk the natural sweetness, fat and proteins tend to soften acidity and highlight caramelised flavours. That’s why lighter filter roasts can sometimes taste a bit sharp or sour with milk — they’re simply not built for it. Espresso roasts being more developed balance this out. The deeper caramelisation creates toffee and cocoa notes that blend harmoniously with milk’s creaminess while a hint of gentle bitterness adds that satisfying ‘coffee punch’ in your flat white or cappuccino.

If you prefer your coffee black this roast will still give you a full-bodied rich cup with plenty of depth and sweetness. For a lighter fruitier experience you might enjoy exploring our filter range instead.

“Heirloom” is a catch-all term for the countless wild or cultivated varieties found in Ethiopia, many of which are genetically unique. These coffees are renowned for their complexity, often showcasing vibrant florals, citrus, and stone fruits. Since they’re genetically diverse and often uncatalogued, each heirloom coffee is a unique experience.

In the washed process, coffee cherries are depulped to remove the skin and pulp, then fermented to eliminate the mucilage before thorough washing. This method produces a clean, bright cup with pronounced acidity and clarity, highlighting the coffee’s intrinsic flavors. It’s widely used in regions with ample water resources, such as Colombia and East Africa.

This refers to the surface colour of the whole roasted bean, but it's not always a reliable indicator of roast level. Some of our most vibrant and lightly roasted coffees, like our Ecuadorian Sidra, may appear medium-dark (Agtron 50–60) due to their surface colour, yet are in fact light roasts with minimal development time. Surface colour can be affected by the original green colour, bean type, density, and moisture — so don't judge a bean by its exterior.

The ROEST P3000 is a compact powerhouse that redefines what’s possible in small-batch production roasting. With the ability to roast 1–3 kg batches in under 7 minutes and crank out over 25 kg per hour, it delivers serious output without demanding a full-time operator. Automation handles everything from preheating to cooldown, with between-batch protocols ensuring consistent conditions roast after roast. Its slim footprint and lightweight build make it perfect for roasteries where space is tight but precision and efficiency are non-negotiable.

What truly sets the P3000 apart is its unmatched control and data richness. It features more than 18 sensors—bean, exhaust, drum, humidity, pressure, and even a first-crack microphone—paired with PID-controlled airflow, drum speed, and temperature. A built-in bean camera offers live visual feedback, eliminating the need for a trier and paving the way for future AI enhancements. Whether you’re dialing in new coffees or replicating profiles at scale, the P3000 brings the lab-level accuracy of the ROEST sample roaster into full production—effortlessly and repeatably.

Jammy apricot with mellow caramel flavours. Balanced acidity and fruit-like sweetness.

Ethiopia | Yirgacheffe Chelchele | Heirloom Washed Special Prep Grade 1 - When is peak flavour?

Chelchele is a washing station in the village of the same name, in the Kochere woreda of the Yirgacheffe growing region. Like most Ethiopian stations it serves several hundred smallholders, each farming a plot small enough that coffee grows alongside the food the family eats. Growers deliver cherry, it is sorted, weighed and paid for, and the station does the processing and the drying.

This is not a standard Chelchele lot. It is a Special Prep — what producers in Ethiopia usually call a "Premium" — and the difference is entirely in the cherry.

Cherry for a Special Prep is collected from a limited number of growers and held to a ripeness standard most lots never see: 90% perfectly ripe red cherry, 5% semi-ripe, 5% overripe. It is kept separate from everything else through processing and storage, and in most cases it comes from a single day lot — picked in one day, processed together. Stations produce only a handful of bags like this a year.

That matters because of what normally happens. Ethiopian washing stations blend cherry from hundreds of growers into daily lots, which makes it effectively impossible to know whose coffee ended up in which bag. Underripe fruit in the mix is where most of the astringency in an Ethiopian washed coffee comes from. Paying for ripeness, and keeping the lot separate, is the whole game.

Cherry is picked ripe and depulped the same day. It ferments in open-air tanks for 8 to 12 hours, is washed through channels to strip the last of the mucilage, then dried on raised beds for 5 to 15 days depending on the weather. The lot is graded Grade 1 — Ethiopia's highest classification, and a defect count rather than a taste score. It means a great deal of sorting happened before this coffee left the country.

We usually push back on the word "heirloom", because it is often used to avoid doing the work of naming the actual landraces. Here it is honest: this lot genuinely isn't traceable to a single variety. It is a mix of native Ethiopian heirloom varieties, cultivated in the coffee gardens around Chelchele and delivered together. Nobody is hiding anything — that is simply what is in the bag.

Kochere is a woreda in the Gedeo zone, sitting just south of Yirgacheffe woreda itself. Both fall inside the Yirgacheffe growing region — one of only three Ethiopian coffee names the country has trademarked — and both trade on it, because the name carries a premium the administrative district never would.

The soils here are iron-rich and acidic, rainfall is reliable, and temperatures sit low enough that cherry ripens slowly. Slow ripening builds sugar and acidity in the seed, and it is the reason Yirgacheffe coffees taste the way they do: tea-like, floral, and bright without being sharp.