Release #4: Yabitu Koba 2018

A couple years back, Passenger featured a coffee from Yabitu Koba, a village in southern Ethiopia’s Guji Zone, for the first time. Given that a selection from Yabitu Koba’s 2019 harvest is being featured on the Reserve Lot menu currently, we decided to roast our final 10 lbs. of the 2018 this week, to provide the opportunity to taste two consecutive harvests from this extraordinary producing region side by side.

Each morning during the harvest season in Guji, roughly 720 smallholder farmers selectively pick and then delivery cherry to the Hana Asrat washing station near Yabitu Koba. The coffee is pulped in the afternoon and early evening. After pulping, the coffee is fermented for 24-48 hours, washed, and then soaked for an additional four hours before being dried on raised beds.

Guji coffees have the potential to express some of the most complex and interesting cup profiles we have ever experienced. This lot from 2018, which has some slight fruit character imparted by fermentation (though in a perfectly clean way), is even more complex than your average washed coffee from Guji. As soon as our green buying team tasted this coffee we knew that it had to be featured on our Reserve Lot menu and we couldn’t be more pleased to feature it again for one more lap of recognition as an archival release!

In the cup, Yabitu Koba offers an incredibly complex sensory experience. Milk chocolate, citrus, and a lightly oxidized oolong tea character can be found on the nose. The cup is wonderfully fruited yet perfectly clean with flavors of strawberry, watermelon, citrus, and a hop-like finish.