ROCKO MOUNTAIN

Tariku Mengesha is the sole owner and producer of this natural coffee entirely on his farms, located throughout the Banko Chelchele neighbourhood of Gedeb district, south of Yirgacheffe and just west of the bulgy border with the vast Oromia region.

This is one of our all time favourite coffees that we buy every year as soon as the season arrives. The flavours are incomparable to anything else. Expect an explosion of berry fruits on the palate. Add a bit of milk and you have a strawberry pudding.

Tariku applies the basic agronomic practices and keeps the field free of any weeds, grows pulse crops in his coffee field so as to maintain the fertility of the soil.
Also does the pruning practices with the technical help from Technoserve and district Agricultural experts.

This lot has been processed as a traditional Natural process, first by soaking the cherries to remove all immature, floaters, overripe and foreign matters and then drying on raised beds for 28 days.

While coffee is Mengesha’s primary income, which he uses to support his family that includes 10 children (3 boys and 7 girls), he also grows navy beans and false banana, called “enset,” which produce no edible fruit but whose root and heart can be harvested.

The average enset matures in four or five years, and the plant can provide around 80 lbs of starchy food, usually fermented underground for up to a year, after which the doughy substance can keep for up to a decade. While the fibers in the heart of the plant can be boiled, the most popular iteration is a fermented enset “bread” or “cheese,” called “kocho” – quite strong and foreign to the western palate, but a staple in Southern Ethiopia.