In the Grinder - Our Daily Coffee Weblog

 

I apologize in advance if this is a bit longwinded, but the view out of the window was totally amazing.

A full moon out of the plane window over  the late afternoon sky above Sudan.  A Mars like scenery below with the dust up at forty thousand feet that you can taste in the cabin.  Touching down in Khartoum on route to Ethiopia.

As the sun sets, the blue sky merges with the dust and a purple-brown replaces it.  A raspberry hue bands across the horizon beneath the moon.  Now below on the deep desert floor, waves of red sands break around black volcanic rock with the moon radiating a full moon glow.

All this color and transformation occurs quickly but smoothly, and it’s now dark outside, besides the stars in the sky.

As always, I’m excited about the trip in front of me and about seeing my travel buddies again.  This time, I was off to Harrar, the old walled city, to see Harrar coffee as it has been grown for hundreds of years.

The first thing that I note, as we drive into the highlands of Harrar, is that this does not look like any other place that I’ve seen where coffee is grown.  It’s dry, almost arid.  It looks like a place where coffee should not be found, yet it is here, and has been here for almost ever.

Donkeys are still the mode of transport most used to bring coffee down from these hills. The many Akrabis (collectors) bring coffee from the farmers to their small stations to ship via truck to the suppliers with their hulling machines.  The camels for the most part have been replaced here by trucks, but the little else has changed.

The trees are old, some of them, very old, up to two hundred years old, and the methods of farming are passive at best.  No fertilizer or pruning here.  “Garden coffee” was a term used often, and that seems to mean that the coffee grows, and you pick the cherries when (hopefully) perfectly ripe.

Why is Harar coffee an unwashed coffee?  Well, there’s really not a lot of water.  This is old school coffee.  It grows naturally here, it’s picked, it’s laid to dry, and it’s hulled and roasted. 

In Ethiopia, the varietals seem to be endless.  There are estimates for over four thousands varietals that exist that seem to be spontaneous mutations of typical.  In most Yergacheffee’s (don’t tell me this is misspelled, I saw the same poster in Ethiopia have two different spellings for Yirgachefe) if you look at the green, you’ll see small little “bourbon-esque” beans, along with long canoe looking beans.  One of the things that I noticed in Harrar was a difference between East and West Harrar coffee.

The Eastern Harrar was lighter yellow in color.  This is the home of the famed Golden beans, coffee this is pure soft yellow.  The bean size was larger too.  The Western Harrar coffee was more longberry, and overall the coffee looked rougher than the Eastern.  Not rougher in preparation, but just less moist and round, and like it had had a tougher time.  Cup wise, I’ve noticed smoother mocha profiles and less earth in Eastern Harrar coffees, but have not cupped exclusively enough to confirm this.  The woodier cedar cup seems to be Western Harrar phenomena.

 

I’ll blog a bit more later this month about the trip, but wanted to toss in a few photos here from our visit to the city of Harrar.  The Hyenas are a bit funky up close.  They are not small dogs, but large animals with supposedly one of the strongest jaws in the animal kingdom.

The house here is Arthur Rimbaud’s, the famed French Poet, who moved to Harrar in the late 1800’s, ran guns, met Haile Selassie's father, and apparently, in the spirit of troubled French intellectuals, ran amuck, and died quite early at 37 years of age.

Lastly, here are a few pictures of the city.  The rest of the pictures will be online later this week.