A week in Guji

There is a particular weight a coffee carries when you have stood in the cherry yourself. It is not romance, exactly. It is closer to the hush you get when you understand the size of someone's year, and how much of it sits between two hands.

We arrived at Kayon Mountain on a Tuesday. The road climbs in long slow turns, the air thins, and then quite suddenly you are inside the canopy. The trees here are older than the farm is old. Some of them remember a different kind of coffee.

Esmael walked us through the drying beds first. Cherries laid by the centimetre, turned every hour during the day, covered at the first sign of cloud. It is staggering, this care, and almost invisible by the time the beans reach our roaster. The job of a small roastery, we decided that week, is partly to make this invisible care a little more visible.

On the way back we stopped in Yirgacheffe for an espresso that had crossed half the world before coming home. It was good. It would have been better at the farm.