XX4 - Abnet Mekonin

Description

This experimental release was sold exclusively to 2026 season reservation holders and will not be released publicly. The fourth coffee in our wildcard series is another Aviary-exclusive and first-ever that comes from a Cup of Excellence winning producer in Bensa, Ethiopia using an unusual and novel processing method: fermented for three days in a pit in the ground lined with enset leaves—presenting winey, bright and intense  with notes of blueberry, raspberry, cherry, pineapple and lime zest. From Christopher: "We sat at the house of Bekele Kachara’s brother in Murago, drinking coffee and eating handfuls of kocho. Bekele’s washing station, just a hundred-meter walk from where we sat and which his brother manages, hummed with activity as the peak harvest approached. "Ensete ventricosum, like Coffea arabica, is native to Ethiopia and is a staple food for 20 million of the country’s people. While its fruit is inedible, the roots of the 6m tall tree are a critical source of nutrition which are traditionally pulverized and fermented by the Sidama people until it develops a strong lactic tang with the texture of couscous or fonio. "As I felt the caffeine hit my bloodstream and my face caught light from the Bensa sun, I was struck by the parallels between kocho production and coffee post-harvest processing like “bioinnovation” and “anaerobic” methods. In other words: the technology used and perfected by Ethiopians over millennia—using the leaves of the enset tree to line pits dug in the ground, protecting it from insects or soil and providing a cooler environment through which to control fermentation—could also be used for fermenting coffee. "Like in the coffee industry, where women provide the critical labor of picking cherry and sorting for defects, women hold the traditional knowledge of enset; they prepare the pit in the ground, roast and pulverize the roots of the young trees, and carefully ferment the pulp for weeks underground. And—as in coffee—women typically go unrecognized for their contributions. "I mused with Bekele that it would be fun to try to produce coffee the way that kocho was produced—and to have his wife produce the lot in the same way she would produce kocho. In turn, I would buy the resulting coffee, no matter the cup outcome, and market the lot under her name.   "Only 45 kilograms of coffee processed using this method were ever produced; Aviary bought all of it. "The result of this process is an unusual cup—tropical and funky aromatics open to intense, winey, chocolatey notes of raspberry, cherry, blueberry, and lime zest."