ON KOKE WASHED

April 2023 Featured Coffee of the Month

By Brian.

We launched our Relationship Coffee program at Summit in 2019, driven by our desire to maintain and highlight partnerships with some of our favorite people and favorite coffees. We love that with craft beer, we can look forward to seasonal releases -- when Sierra Nevada drops Celebration Ale every fall, it's practically a holiday in my household. We also aspire to build relationships with coffee producers that build a more sustainable supply chain -- they can count on Summit to purchase their coffee, and we can count on them to produce something we (and our customers) love.

On Summit's Mount Rushmore for relationships in our now 8 years of sourcing coffee, there's one from Africa that stands taller than the rest: Koke.

Our relationship with Koke (pronounced KO-KAY), Summit's featured coffee of April, dates back to 2017. We had sampled several harvests and different processing methods from Koke, a family-owned washing station in a town that shares the same name. The first coffee we purchased from Koke, through our friends at Ally Coffee, was the Naturally processed one -- I remember being blown away by how clean the coffee tasted while still being what we call a "fruit bomb." We were still just 2 years into our roasting business here at Summit, and interacting with coffees as well-produced as Koke was a treat.

While Koke Natural was a crowd favorite, we fell more in love in 2018 with the Washed processed coffee from Koke. From the famed Yirgacheffe coffee region, this typifies everything Summit looks for in a washed Ethiopian coffee. It's incredibly clean - the flavors are distinct, the acidity is bright, the body is smooth and juicy. Washed Ethiopian coffees are known for their lemon and black tea characteristics, and Koke Washed has those in spades. But it's also so much more dynamic, and what blows us away every year is how much better Koke is with every new harvest. The coffee trees grow more mature, and the 96 small-scale farmers who contribute to this coffee continue to improve all aspects of production. It's so fun to stand around a cupping table with Laura and Sarah and Parker, and rave about what we're all tasting together, and this year's Koke harvest is the best yet.

For most coffee drinkers, the relationship and the cup quality are enough to get excited every spring when we release coffee from Koke. But for those of you who want to nerd out even more about Koke, the history of Yirgacheffe, and how the multi-generational producers take such care of this coffee, we can have that conversation, too.

The Koke station stands on the side of a hill in Yirgacheffe, which has the ideal topography, elevation, and water sources to produce and process exceptional coffees. Yirgacheffe is considered by many to be the birthplace of coffee and the coffee trees grown in the region are a naturally occurring mix of heirloom varietals cultivated among other species in coffee gardens and coffee forests. Washed Coffee was introduced to Ethiopia in the 1970’s, and Yirgacheffe was the location of the first wet processing mill. For the last five years, the Koke station managers have been separating out the higher elevation cherries for Ally, and the quality clearly shows.

As Ally reports to us, at Koke the producers freshly sort the coffee cherries before depulping to separate out over-ripe and under-ripe beans. After depulping, coffee is allowed to ferment naturally for 36-72 hours in the washing station’s 10 cement fermentation tanks. The fermented coffee is washed with clean running water, soaked in clean water with a pH of 7.8, and then dried for 18-21 days on Koke’s 89 raised beds to retain around 11.5% moisture. Dried parchment coffee is stored at the washing station warehouse until it is transported to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital some 300 miles away, for further processing.