From source to sip
The story behind your next cup.
In the Gedeb district of Yirgacheffe, where the hillsides climb past two thousand meters, Bedhatu Jibicho has tended an 84-acre farm for more than fifty years. Her coffee carries the clarity of one of the highest growing areas on earth.
Gedeb sits within the Gedeo zone of southern Ethiopia, part of the Yirgacheffe region that built its reputation on delicate, floral, tea-like cups. The district reaches some of the loftiest coffee elevations in the world, and that altitude does real work in the cup. Cherries on high, cool slopes ripen slowly, concentrating sugars and acids that translate into brightness and structure. You can read more about how thin mountain air shapes a coffee in our guide to high-altitude coffee .
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The Coffee Story
The SourceA Matriarch of Gedeb
Gedeb sits within the Gedeo zone of southern Ethiopia, part of the Yirgacheffe region that built its reputation on delicate, floral, tea-like cups. The district reaches some of the loftiest coffee elevations in the world, and that altitude does real work in the cup. Cherries on high, cool slopes ripen slowly, concentrating sugars and acids that translate into brightness and structure. You can read more about how thin mountain air shapes a coffee in our guide to high-altitude coffee .
Bedhatu Jibicho, matriarch of the Roba family, has managed her farm by hand for over fifty years without chemical inputs. Her business, Roba and Family Coffee, has become one of Gedeb's most successful single-farm exporters, employing a year-round crew alongside seasonal harvest workers, most of them women. The family reinvests in the surrounding area, building local infrastructure and operating cherry collection sites that give neighboring smallholders a path to market. Ethiopia is Africa's largest coffee producer and a top exporter of arabica worldwide, and farms like this one show how recent export reforms have opened doors for individual growers.
The CraftThree Washes, One Clean Cup
This lot is triple washed, an exacting take on the classic wet method that the farm reserves for its cleanest cherry. Ripe fruit is hand-sorted, floated to remove low-density beans, then depulped and fermented before being washed and graded by density across repeated cycles. Parchment dries slowly on raised beds, hand-sorted again and shaded during the harshest afternoon sun. The result strips away nearly every trace of fruit pulp and leaves a strikingly transparent profile. To understand how washing differs from natural drying, see our breakdown of washed and natural processing methods .
These beans arrive dense and low in moisture, the hallmark of a high-grown Ethiopian, so we give them a touch more heat early in the roast. We take them to City+, a roast that holds the floral top notes and tea-like delicacy in place rather than burning them off. Nothing here is pushed toward smoke or char. The goal is to let Gedeb speak in its own clean, bright voice.
The CupFloral, Citrus, and Sweet
The first impression is black tea and ripe orange, a bright citrus lift wrapped in something soft and floral. As the cup cools, peach and a rounder caramel sweetness emerge, with a curious herbal note of sweet basil running underneath. The body stays light and the finish runs long and clean, the kind of clarity that triple washing is built to deliver.
