Ethiopia Worka Sakaro Anaerobic Natural

Considered to be the birthplace of coffee, Ethiopia is one of the only places in the world where coffee plants grow wild. The country's nutrient rich soil coupled with its vast genetic diversity of varietals can produce amazingly complex coffees with unique and exotic flavors.

Worka Sakaro is a municipality located in a small high altitude area in the Gedeb district, close to Yirgacheffe, in southern Ethiopia. It is a remote but impressively industrious area for coffee production with over half of its 1300 hectares dedicated to coffee cultivation. One of the area's many washing stations is owned and operated by Tracon Trading, an independent coffee company and direct exporter. Tracon's Worka Sakaro station is their largest facility, with 360 drying beds on nearly 5 hectares of land and 596 smallholder producers contributing coffee cherries. Originally built in 2008, many improvements to the station have been made in recent years.

Tracon Trading operates two coffee farms and 30 washing and drying stations across Ethiopia. Operating a variety of small stations in many regions allows the company to save processing time, save transportation costs, reduce C02 emissions, and create jobs in different parts of Ethiopia. Tracon also owns a modern coffee cleaning and storage plant as well as a coffee cupping and quality control lab.

The local smallholder farmers carefully harvest their coffee cherries when perfectly ripe and deliver them to the washing station. At Tracon's Worka Sakaro station, the cherries are hand sorted and defective cherries are removed. For the anaerobic natural process, the selected fresh cherries are vacuum sealed in stainless steel canisters to ferment for 4-5 days. This creates an environment that is slowly deprived of oxygen and increasingly pressurized by the carbon dioxide emitted during fermentation. The process is carefully monitored. When the moisture level falls to 30%, the steel canisters are opened and the cherries are transferred directly to raised African drying beds. They are sundried in thin layers for 15-18 days or until their moisture content is 11%.

The coffee is transported to Tracon Trading's state of the art coffee cleaning and storage plant in Addis Ababa to be hulled, sorted, and prepared for export. The plant is equipped with modern coffee processing machines and a Buhler Z+ color sorter to insure only high quality beans are selected. This coffee is hand-sorted a final time before being bagged. The whole facility is clean, and the warehouses have ample lighting and ventilation specifically designed to keep the coffee fresh while being stored.