Ethiopia Guji Kayon Mountain
One Real 16oz. Pound
About this Coffee
Aroma: Complex & thick with cinnamon spice and chocolate cherry tobacco aroma
Body: Juicy full body, filled with Cinnamon Toast, lemon zest & baked almond bread
Finish: Lingering sweet, silky smooth hot chocolate rum raisin & cinnamon toast
GROWER: Kayon Mountain Coffee Farm PLC
REGION: Shakiso District, Guji Zone, Oromia Region, Ethiopia
ALTITUDE: 1900 – 2200 masl
PROCESS: Fully washed and dried in the sun
VARIETY: Indigenous heirloom cultivars
HARVEST: October – January
SOIL: Vertisol
CERTIFICATION: Organic
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Ethiopia Guji Kayon Mountain
There are few entrances to Guji, a distant and heavily forested swath stretching southeast through the lower corner of the massive Oromia region. None of these routes are for the queasy in any way. Guji is heavily forested thanks to its native people, part of Ethiopia’s vast and diverse Oromo nation, who have for generations organized and legislated to reduce mining and logging outfits in their area in a struggle to conserve the land’s sacred canopy.
Compared to other coffee-heavy regions, large parts of Guji feel like prehistoric backwoods. Coffee farms in many parts of Guji begin at 2000 meters in elevation and tend to climb from there. The highland farming communities in this country can be considered Edenic in their natural purity and startlingly remote.
Near the town of Taro in the Odo Shakiso district is Kayon Mountain, founded by Ismael Hassen, a native of the Kercha district who was born and raised surrounded by Guji’s coffee culture. Kayon Mountain is a massive coffee estate with over 1000 planted acres of select Ethiopian arabica cultivars. The coffee genetics were originally isolated and bred by the Jimma Agricultural Research Center, whose coffee agenda includes studying and distributing select indigenous cultivars of Ethiopian coffee to help domestic farms renew and remain disease-resistant as they evolve. These coffees are some of the Center’s oldest and are both descendants of heirloom varieties isolated from the Illubabor Zone, a historic coffee region in the West of Ethiopia, also a part of the Oromia Region.
Kayon Mountain stands out in many ways amongst the broader landscape of Ethiopian coffee. To begin with, estates this large are rare in a country defined by its smallholder systems. There are over four million coffee farmers in Ethiopia. The average cultivation is a few hundred trees each. Next, Kayon Mountain exports its coffee, a rare standing for farms of any size in Ethiopia, and as a result, it can bypass the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange auction entirely. Third, the estate was founded in 2012, when the Guji Zone government began carefully approving land grants to groups with ambitious organic farming plans that included preserving the primary forests in their areas. So, not only is the estate extremely young by Ethiopian standards, but an environmental mandate has also been built into their grant.
The Kayon Mountain team has increased production over the past seven harvests and is applying for an additional land grant to expand their operation further. In addition to their own planted land, the farm buys and processes cherry from 12 other local, larger farms that are also organic and Rainforest Alliance certified.