Demeka Becha site is situated at the top of a hill, which is ideal for air flow along the drying beds. You enter through tin gates which open onto lush green grass and, if you’re lucky, smiling day laborers lined up clapping and whistling their excitement at your visit. The Demeka Becha site is owned by Ayele Tulu, a Sidama man who is deeply integrated into the local area of Bona Zuria. His son, Tsegab Ayele, manages the project.
Demeka Becha site buys cherries from nearby communities including Dilla Suke, Demeka, Goacho, Becha, and Bashiro Dale—close to 10,000 producers are situated in the areas surrounding the washing station. Producers bring their cherries to be weighed on the blue scale, logged in the book by Cashier and General Manager, Alemu Gobaro, and floated before being dumped into the cement hopper to begin the journey through the 4-disk Agard pulper and into fermentation tanks and cement washing channels. There are 10 tanks for density grades 1 and 2, and 2 tanks for low density coffee destined for our Community Lot program or for the local market. Following fermentation and washing, the parchment coffee is carried by hand to the drying beds where laborers spread it out to the depth of a fingertip and keep it turning until it is dried and moved to the locked storehouse to await trucking to Addis Ababa and final processing.
This particular coffee is a Natural Experimental Fermentation processing, starting with ripe cherries. Once they reach the washing station, we pay an additional premium for them to undergo special handling - first placed into float tanks so lower-density cherries can be skimmed off, leaving the highest density fruit to sink. At this stage in a typical natural process, the remaining high density cherries will be moved to the beds, but this Natural Experimental Process has undergone another critical fermentation step.
The high density cherries are placed in sealed off barrels which offsets the oxygen and allows the coffee to ferment in a an oxygen-limited environment for period of 96 hours in a cool area. While the oxygen within the environment is not entirely controlled, the resulting fermentation is of a pseudo-spontaneous nature, meaning it is impacted by naturally occurring and non-manipulated environmental yeasts.
Post-fermentation, the cherries are carried to open-air drying tables that are shaded by mesh canopies and they laid out to slowly let the sun kiss them and draw out their moisture content. Once the cherries reach their ideal drying level, they are bagged up and kept carefully separate as they are transported first to a regional processing mill.
