We have been buying coffees from Khalid for many years now but it was not until my visit to his farm in November 2023 when I was able to make an impact on the quality of his coffees. During that visit I was able go through his production steps to see if we could agree upon a protocol for him to follow in order to try to elevate the quality of his coffees. As usual there were many small details that could be improved, some with small and others with major impact on the final quality. A few of the major ones included separation of every daily picking, keeping each daily lot stored in air tight grain pro bags after drying. Drying the coffees under shade nets, keeping better control of the fermentation and slightly changing the process were also part of what we changed and improved. This meant that I was able to evaluate several samples, each representing a daily picking, instead of just 2-3 samples like previous years where the coffees had been bulked together.
By doing this we were able to remove the lower qualities from the higher quality lots and in combination with better processing and drying practices the coffees really cleaned up and became more expressive. We would of course not be able to change all this in such short time had it not been for the wonderful help and follow up done by Fantanesh Keleme and the whole team at Belco in Ethiopia, who made sure Khalid understood and followed the protocols for all the coffees he produced for us.
We also milled the coffees in a smaller dry-mill this year where we were able to also vacuum pack the coffees before export. This helps preserve the coffees flavour and freshness for a much longer time.
