Our first Ethiopian harvest this year, Refisa has a deep sweetness that reminds us of pickled peaches, which supports the aromatic notes of jasmine and citrus. On our trip to Ethiopia in February, we visited SNAPS headquarters in Addis Ababa, where we tasted several coffees from this year's harvest. This washed lot is processed at SNAP Coffee's washing station in the town of Refisa, located in the Nansebo area, close to Sidamo. On our trip to Ethiopia in February, we visited SNAPS headquarters in Addis Ababa, where we participated in tastings of several coffees from this year's harvest. The coffee for this lot is grown by 742 small farmers in the cities of Refisa, Roricho, Bulga and Riripa. The processing of the lot is very typical Ethiopian, with a long and controlled fermentation after the beans have been shelled. Parchment of coffee is fermented under water, which lowers the temperature rise caused by the fermentation. This allows a slow fermentation, up to 60 hours, to create a round and complex expression in the cup. In Rifisa's case, a deep sweetness is created that reminds us of pickled peaches that support the aromatic top notes of jasmine and citrus. In Ethiopia, coffee is still growing semi-wild, and in some cases even completely wild. Apart from areas in South Sudan, Ethiopia is the only country where coffee grows in this way. This is also why Ethiopia is seen as the birthplace of the Arabica coffee. In many regions, small producers still harvest coffee berries from wild coffee trees, which grow in the high-lying forests, especially in the area around Ethiopia's famous Great Rift Valley. There are three categories of Ethiopian forest coffee; Forest Coffee (FC), Semi-Forest Coffee (SFC) and Forest Garden Coffee (FGC). Forest Coffee grows wild and virtually without growing the coffee farmers, Semi-forest is grown a bit more and Forest Garden Coffee is the most cultivated of the forest coffees. Forest Coffee accounts for about 60% of Ethiopia's annual production, so it's an incredibly significant production method and one of the reasons Ethiopian coffee is so special. The Ethiopian coffee growing methods help to ensure a much higher biodiversity than in traditional coffee production. This is partly thanks to the forest cultivation system, and partly because of the genetic diversity of the coffee plants themselves. There are thousands of uncategorized Heirloom variants growing in Ethiopia; they all originate from wild cross-pollination between species of the original Arabian trees. Biodiversity leads to more hardy coffee plants that do not require artificial pollination. 95% of coffee production in Ethiopia is organic, although many smaller coffee producers and mills cannot afford to pay for the certification and therefore cannot market their products as organic. The absence of monoculture in the Ethiopian coffee country also makes the plants much less susceptible to diseases such as leaf rust, which has attacked other coffee producing countries, hard.