NOTE: This coffee was recently transitioned from a medium roast to a light/med roast, to better highlight it’s bright and fruity notes.

This lush Ethiopian carries all the hallmarks of the region - big on blueberry with a sweet intoxicating fruit-forward profile.

Kayon Mountain is a standout, in many ways, among the broader landscape of Ethiopian coffee. To begin with, estates this large are rare in a country defined by its smallholder systems: there are over four million coffee farmers in Ethiopia and the average cultivation is a few hundred trees each. Next, Kayon Mountain exports its own coffee—a rare standing for farms of any size in Ethiopia—and as a result can bypass the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange auction entirely. Third, the estate was founded in 2012, when the Guji Zone government began carefully approving land grants to groups with ambitious organic farming plans that included the preservation of primary forest among their areas. So not only is the estate extremely young by Ethiopian standards, there is an environmental mandate built into their grant.

Ethiopia’s Guji zone in many ways feels like the next generation of Ethiopian coffee. We see the marketplace itself evolving constantly in this country--the very exciting new wave of direct exports for one, the rise of private washing stations and boutique domestic buyers for another, and the foundation of modernized, large estates with quality and social justice equally at the forefront, setting management examples for producers worldwide. Guji itself however, as a place, a people, and a coffee, is like a newly emerged origin altogether. The forest-heavy zone with a conservationist spirit and uniquely candy-like coffees is getting its break now, and the world is better for it.

Roast: light/medium

Tasting Notes: blueberry, vanilla, milk chocolate, peach

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