Tasting notes: Dried Cherry, Blueberry, Milk Chocolate, Lemon Peel, Smooth Body

Mokonissa is one of the primary cooperatives belonging to the Sidama Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union (SCFCU), one of Ethiopia’s largest and best-known exporting organizations. SCFCU is robust; there are 53 member cooperatives in the union and over 80,000 member households throughout the Sidama Zone. Harvest in Sidama occurs slightly earlier than in the more southern zones of Gedeo and Guji, and as a result the coffees from here are usually the year’s very first top quality arrivals from anywhere in Ethiopia.

In processing, unlike in most of Sidama, Mokonissa willingly invests in the necessary resources to produces clean and high quality naturals. One of these resources is drying space: full coffee cherries are greater in volume than the seeds alone, not to mention naturals need to dry slowly in a single layer, which, when combined, necessitate many more raised beds for an equal output of coffee. The other is labor: Mokonissa employs up to 100 people at the station to oversee the constant maintenance of large-scale parchment and cherry drying. Once fully dried and cured, final milling for export is completed at the Union mill in Addis Ababa.