The Swarm
$25.00
Vibes
Strawberry Jam, Heavy Whipping Cream, and Apricot
Grower
A constellation of smallholder farmers orbiting the Banko Chelchele station, each tending their plots like secret gardens of fruit and fire.
Altitude
1900–2300 masl — basically “nosebleed coffee,” grown where oxygen is thin and flavors get weird in the best way.
Variety
Local superheroes 74110 + 74112, Ethiopian cultivars bred to thrive and glow like rare gems.
Soil
Vertisol: dark, dense, volcanic clay that holds water like memory and pushes cherries toward intensity.
Region
Banko Chelchele, Gedeb — the far edge of Gedeo Zone where the roads turn to dust, the air turns electric, and coffee stops pretending to be Yirgacheffe.
Process
Full natural: cherries sunbathing until their skins wrinkle and sugars implode, drying under open sky until they taste like cosmic candy.
Harvest
October–December, when hands stain crimson with fruit and the hills hum with drying beds.
Certification
Conventional — no fancy stamps, just honest fruit turned into sensory fireworks.
Quantity
Background
Chelchele, Gedeb — The Coffee That Forgot Gravity
From the hills of Chelchele, down in Gedeb’s southern Gedeo Zone, comes a coffee that feels less grown than conjured. Farmers here coax cherries out of volcanic soil at absurd elevations, then hand them off to processors who treat each fruit like it’s radioactive stardust.
Gedeb isn’t Yirgacheffe, though people lump it in. It’s louder, wilder, the zone’s feral cousin who shows up to the party in sequins and doesn’t leave till sunrise. Naturals here smell like a florist shop exploded in your kitchen. Washed lots? Like fruit candy dissolved into crystal water. It’s chaos, but elegant.
The Station
EDN runs Chelchele like a small universe: 200+ humans orbiting the harvest, sorting and turning cherry nonstop. Farmers get pre-financed, workers get fed and housed, and the whole operation hums like an ecosystem with better HR than most tech companies. In a place where processors fight for loyalty, EDN wins by giving a damn.
The Ferment (aka Coffee in Space Drums)
This microlot is a supernatural anaerobic natural. Translation: cherries sealed into carbon fiber drums, oxygen stripped away, fermenting for 7–10 days in cool mountain air. Think of it as the fruit holding its breath underwater until its sugars transform into something otherworldly—sweet, syrupy, almost too much. Almost.
Then it’s out onto raised beds, sun-bathing slowly until the fruit dries into shriveled candy shells. After that, weeks of rest in a cool warehouse, letting water molecules chill the hell out before the beans are prepped for Addis and beyond.
The Cup
Floral. Berries. Candy that sparkles like neon. It doesn’t just taste like coffee; it tastes like Gedeb screaming into the void: “We are not Yirgacheffe.”