Homecoming Season #newcoffee

As a HBCU graduate and administrator, I know that Homecoming is a sacred time. It's our time to go home to our alma maters, the homes that prepared us for leadership, global citizenship, and fruitful lives throughout the Diaspora. this is our time to reconnect with friends, family, and friends who feel like family. We converge for football, tailgating, partying, workshops, panels, and late nights that bloom into early mornings. This year, many of us are celebrating virtually…again. So, we're dropping a new coffee to celebrate together, from wherever. This coffee helms from none other than Ethiopia, the home of coffee. 

 

This beautiful coffee is from the Gogogu Bekeka wet mill in the Guji Zone, Uraga Woreda. Grown at the highest elevation in Ethiopia (2310 masl), this Grade 1 coffee undergoes an intensive washing process before drying on raised beds. The Gogogu Bekeka mill is surrounded by small farmholders, whose cherries are combined and processed at the mill. We collaborated with Red Fox Coffee Merchants to bring you this truly unique coffee. 

 

The traditional Ethiopian fruity and floral tasting notes are rounded out a dark chocolatey finish, and balanced acidity. We were happily overwhelmed by the dark chocolate, cherry, almond and vanilla notes. As I sipped this coffee, it evoked some of my favorite memories of being in Ethiopia for Timket in 2016, and for Fasika just this past May. In Ethiopia, coffee is not just about getting that power boost in the morning. It's not about grabbing-and-going. 

 

There is an intrinsic spirituality to coffee in Ethiopia, from the slow pace of the Bunna ceremony, to the slow consumption that happens within community. I'll never forget my first sips of Ethiopian coffee in 2008, when I was interning at a church in Berkeley, California. I had been taken in by an Ethiopian family at the church, who regularly lavished me to food, coffee, community, and a sense of home. On that evening, the coffee had just been freshly roasted over an open flame, ground by hand, and brewed in the Jebena. I couldn't stop drinking it, and my hosts would lovingly add more water to the pot to brew more coffee. Bunna (coffee) is a sacred experience that can hardly be replicated. 

 

As is our annual ritual of traveling home for Homecoming. 

 

Homecoming is available here for pre-order now, and will begin shipping next week. I hope that you can taste the love when you brew this coffee.