A beautifully clean and juicy natural from smallholder producers in Bookkisa, a kebele in the Shakiso district of Guji. Grown at 2,000–2,150 MASL among the lush forests for which the region is known, the cherries are delivered to the Bookkisa washing station, operated by Sookoo Coffee. Careful drying and rigorous picking and sorting result in a natural with loads of sweetness and clarity: blueberry, honey and raspberry.
Sookoo Coffee is a family-owned producing and exporting company based in Guji, led by producer Ture Waji, affectionately known as the “King of Guji” for his deep and longstanding connection to the region and its coffee-growing communities.
Sookoo operates across three woredas (districts) in East Guji — Shakiso, Uraga and Haro Welabu — working with small groups of local farmers who deliver their cherries to Sookoo’s drying stations. Between harvests, the team provides farmers with training in agricultural and harvesting practices, helping to improve both quality and productivity from year to year.
This lot is made up of two varieties: Gibirinna 74110 and Serto 74112. Both are part of the “Meta Bashari selections”, a group of varieties identified and developed by the Jimma Agricultural Research Center (JARC) in the 1970s. The varieties were selected from coffee growing in the forests of the Meta Bushari region, in part for their resistance to coffee diseases, and have since become some of the most widely planted varieties in Ethiopia.
Freshly harvested cherries are delivered to the Bookkisa washing station, where they are rigorously sorted to remove underripe, overripe and defective fruit.
The whole cherries are then laid directly onto raised drying beds, where they begin to ferment and dry simultaneously. Sookoo keeps the cherries in a very shallow layer, no more than 4cm deep, and turns them at least six times each day. This careful management helps ensure even drying and prevents excessive fermentation.
The cherries are dried for 21–28 days, with the combination of shallow beds, frequent turning and careful sorting helping to preserve the clean, fruit-forward character we look for in natural coffees.
This is the second coffee we’ve purchased from Sookoo through Osito, an importing company we’ve long admired for its relational approach and commitment to building transparent, long-term partnerships between producers and roasters.
Osito has worked with Ture Waji since the very beginning — they were, in fact, his first customer. We purchased our first Sookoo coffee in 2025, a washed lot that we really enjoyed and that proved particularly popular. So when we came back to Sookoo’s coffees this year, we were keen to see what else they had to offer.
What drew us to this lot was its particularly clean expression of the natural process: bright, juicy fruit flavours without the over-fermented or muddled character that can sometimes dominate naturally processed coffees. It’s exactly the kind of natural coffee we love to drink.
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