Ethiopia - Natural Yirgacheffe

About the Coffee

Yirgacheffe sits in southern Ethiopia at around 1,800 meters above sea level and is one of the most well-known coffee-growing regions in the world. Coffee here is typically grown on small family plots, often alongside other food crops, with farmers delivering their ripe coffee cherries to a central washing station during harvest season. Each station receives cherry from anywhere from several hundred to over a thousand smallholder farmers throughout the season.

Because so many farmers contribute to a single washing station, individual producer traceability is rarely possible in Ethiopia. Day lots blend cherry from multiple farms by necessity, not by choice. Terminal 3 works around this by sourcing from the same washing stations year after year through established export partners, building consistency and trust at the station level even when farm-level tracking isn't feasible.

This lot is processed naturally, meaning the whole coffee cherry is dried with the fruit still intact around the bean rather than being washed off first. In Ethiopia, natural processing is traditional in drier regions and allows the fruit's sugars to interact with the bean over several weeks of drying. The heirloom Ethiopian varieties used here are indigenous to the region and have never been formally classified, grown from the same genetic stock that has been cultivated in Ethiopia for centuries.