This Dry Process Yirga Cheffe is a rather new coffee. What you have bought from us in the past is Bagersh Misty Valley dry-processed coffee from the Gedio zone, Idido Yirga-Cheffe. And lately we have cupped the 90+ Nekisse which is nice too. With the new ECX coffee exchange rules for Ethiopia coffee exports, all lots (with an exception of FTO cooperative coffees) are made anonymous when they enter the Government warehouse. That means we do not know exactly which cooperative or mill this lot is from. We know it is a Yirga Cheffe, a Grade 3 (which means little - see my notes on the grading system), and nobody needs to tell us it is a dry-process. One look at the coffee, one sniff of the fragrance when grinding, and you WILL know. While making lots anonymous has been a setback for us, and our coffee relationships in Ethiopia are on hold, a solution is in the works for next harvest ... and it doesn't mean great lots suddenly disappeared. The great coffees are still there, we just know less about them. I would hazard a guess here that this is a Gedio zone lot, which is the best area to do natural (dry-process) coffee in Yirga Cheffe, and that it might be from Idido town district as well. As you know, the tradition in Yirga-cheffe. is wet-processing, whereas Harar has a dry-processing tradition. Wet-processing is the method used in Central America and the like, resulting in a green seed with a cleaner cup profile, and less earthy or rustic cup flavors. Dry-processing involves drying the entire coffee cherry in the sun, and later removing the skin, fruity mucilage layer and protective parchment shell that surrounds the green seed ... all in one fell swoop. Excellent dry-processed coffees are difficult because the milling method for wet-processing allows for separation of ripe and unripe coffee cherry (and other defective seeds) using water and machines. But in dry-processing, sorting your under-ripes is done visually, either by sorting the ripe cherry, or later, sorting the "green" bean. (You probably know from experience with Harar and the like that the dry-processed green bean is in fact yellow, mostly because it has more of the silverskin, the chaff, still attached to it). The problem in Ethiopia is this: traditional dry-processed coffee is NOT pre-sorted to include only ripe red coffee cherry and it is sun-dried in a rather haphazard fashion. The difference with this lot is night and day (as an experienced eye can see when you look at the unroasted coffee), this originates with ripe cherry, is uniformly screen-dried in the sun, and has been dry-milled using the same screen and density-sorting techniques as wet-processed lots. A few under-ripes get through, but overall the flavor hints at better sorting up front in the milling process.