Ethiopia Reshad Ababulgu, White Honey 74110

Tastes Like: Wildflower Honey, Baked Apple, Mandarin Orange, Jasmine

Origin: Limu, Ethiopia

Variety: 74110

Producer: Reshad Ababulg

Elevation: 2050 masl

Process: White Honey

Reshad Ababulgu farms 13 hectares at 2,050 meters near Bersoma, outside the town of Agaro in the Jimma zone of Oromia, where the coffee is graded and sold under the Limu name. The land has been in his family for around sixty years, passing from his grandfather to his father to him, and he replanted it himself with improved varieties in the early 2010s. He works with twenty outgrowers alongside his own trees, and he lives less than a kilometer from the farm with his wife and three children, with coffee now the whole of the family's income. Farmers around Agaro built the area's reputation delivering cherry to cooperatives like Duromina, whose name the coffee then travelled under, and Reshad holds his own export license, which is why this one carries his.

Wildflower honey opens the cup and runs the length of it, a light floral sweetness that never turns heavy, and underneath it there is baked apple, soft and warm, giving the cup its weight. Mandarin orange lifts through the middle, sweet and round, with the fragrance of the peel sitting behind the juice, and as the cup cools jasmine comes forward in the aroma. The texture is round and syrupy, the finish is long, and the sweetness holds from the first sip to the last.

The trees are 74110, a selection the Jimma Agricultural Research Center made in 1974 from wild mother trees near Bishari village in the forests of western Ethiopia, where it was looking for resistance to coffee rust disease and found it in trees that cupped well. The plants are compact and carry small cherries, and they hold the floral, tea-like character that has kept the selection in the ground across the west of the country ever since. At 2,050 meters the nights are cold enough to slow the trees down, so the cherries ripen slowly and hold their acidity.

White honey sits at the driest end of the honey range, and most of the work is done at the pulper: ripe cherries are floated and sorted, then pulped, and almost all of the mucilage comes away with the skin, leaving a thin layer on the parchment. That parchment goes onto raised beds in shallow layers and is turned often so the layer dries before fermentation can carry it far, and it has to be watched, because the sugar holds moisture and an overloaded bed will turn sticky. Leaving that much sugar on the seed and no more is the whole intention of the method, and you taste it in a cup of wildflower honey, baked apple, mandarin orange and jasmine, sweet throughout and clear the whole way down.