Ethiopia - Gotiti (Natural)

600 smallholder farmers handpick their ripe cherries for this lovely coffee from Gotiti–a sentence that makes it sound like “one and done.” In reality, harvesting coffee entails multiple pickings throughout the season as coffee cherries don’t all ripen at the same time. Outgrowers bring their yield to the washing station after every picking. Again, this is not a simple one-off task.

Coffee transport (and indeed transport of anything) is not a task for the faint-hearted—growers may carry their day’s harvest in a bag on their shoulders or tie bags onto a donkey's back. If they have too much for a donkey to carry, they may hire a donkey cart. Or they may take their life in their hands to hire one of the tiny 3-wheeled blue and white taxis that squeeze in and out of traffic, navigate potholes big enough to swallow them, and transport anything from coffee to goats to market day finds.

In the Gedeb area (as in most of Ethiopia), coffee trees share space with local shade trees—Cordia Africana and Acacia, as well as the ubiquitous Ensete ventricosum, the root of which is used for food. Boiled chunks of the rhizome are called “amicho,'' while flatbread made by grinding it is known as “kocho.” Near and often surrounding every home compound, you can see the rising, vermillion-spined bright green leaves of the enset plant (think banana tree leaves with a red accent), sometimes towering up to 15 or 20 feet tall. Other varieties lack the red central spine, but still give the impression of the tropics.

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