Aster Bekele
Uraga, Guji Zone · Ethiopia · 2050 masl
Overview
Aster took over four hectares above Uraga in 2014, with a drying operation her father had let go. She rebuilt the beds first — thirty-two of them — before she touched anything else, because the beds are where the coffee is either made or lost.
We have bought from her every season since 2021. The curve on the profile page is the one we ran on her 2026 lot, unedited.
The farm
Heirloom varieties on shaded terraces, picked over eleven passes because the cherry does not ripen evenly at this altitude. The washing station is a twenty-minute walk downhill; most of the crop never sees it, because the naturals outsell the washed lots four to one.
"You can taste a bad drying bed six months later. So we walk them twice a day, and we write down what we did."
Aster Bekele · Uraga, Guji Zone
The process
Cherry goes onto the bed the afternoon it is picked, one layer deep, turned every ninety minutes for the first four days. Eighteen days total. Moisture comes off slowly enough that the sugars stay put instead of fermenting into something loud.
The coffee
We roast it light — first crack at 8:45, dropped at 11:30, 23.9 % development. It does not need much. Peach skin, jasmine, a bergamot edge on the finish that shows up as the cup cools.
Read the profile — Strecker-01 →Want the next lot from this farm?
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