Aricha is a washing station, not a farm — around 340 smallholders in the hills above Yirgacheffe deliver cherry here through the harvest, most of them working plots smaller than a tennis court. What comes out the other end is the coffee most people mean when they say they like Ethiopian coffee.

This is the natural lot: whole cherry laid on raised beds for eighteen days, turned by hand through the heat of the day. Done badly that gets you something boozy and flat. Done at this altitude, with this much fuss, you get blueberry and jasmine and a black-tea finish that lasts a genuinely long time.

Brewing it

Go coarser than you think and keep the water hot. It is a forgiving coffee at 15g to 250g, and it will still taste like itself if you leave it to go cold — which, for what it's worth, is our favourite way to drink it.