Introducing Angel's Reserve: An Auction-Grade Ethiopia from Kercha Haruse

Every so often a lot comes across the cupping table that's good enough to make us rethink how we do business. This is one of those coffees. It's why we built an entirely new tier around it: Angel's Reserve, our home for the rarest, highest-scoring coffees we can get our hands on. First up under that label is an Ethiopia Kercha Haruse — a dry-processed, auction-grade lot out of the Guji Zone that scored 93 points on our own cupping table. Here's why it earned the honor.

If you've read our post on what makes Ethiopian coffee so special, you already know Yirgacheffe by name. Guji is its neighbor, and in coffee circles it's earned a reputation every bit as serious. This particular lot comes from a site near Kercha town, right on the border of Uraga in Ethiopia's southern Guji Zone.

The station behind it runs an outgrower program with more than 1,500 smallholder farmers, most of them tending less than a hectare of heirloom coffee trees, at altitudes climbing as high as 2,200 meters. That's the same story we love telling about Ethiopia again and again: no industrial plantations, no single varietal, just generations of small family farms working impossibly high ground, growing coffee trees whose genetics are older than the concept of a "coffee variety" itself.

Most of the Ethiopian coffee we carry is washed — cherries are pulped, fermented, and rinsed clean before drying. This lot is different. It's dry process, also called "natural," which means the whole cherry goes straight onto raised beds in the sun, skin, pulp, and all, and stays there for weeks while it slowly loses moisture.

During that time, the sugars and fruit compounds in the cherry pulp have nowhere to go but into the bean itself. The cherries darken from bright red to a deep, raisined maroon as they dry, and the bean underneath soaks up all that fruit character. It's a riskier, more hands-on method than washing — every raised bed has to be turned constantly and watched for mold or over-fermentation — but when it's done right, it produces some of the most distinctive, wine-like cups in the coffee world.

This lot is farm gate, meaning the station buys cherry directly from the farmers who grew it rather than through a middleman, and it's graded Grade 1, Ethiopia's top export classification. But what really sets it apart is that it's auction grade — the kind of small, exceptional lot that gets pulled aside and sold competitively to the roasters willing to pay for it, rather than blended into a larger commercial offering.

That scarcity is exactly why we're not packaging this one the way we package the rest of our lineup. Angel's Reserve bags hold 8oz instead of our standard 12oz, because there simply isn't enough of this lot to go around, and we'd rather more people get to try a smaller amount of something exceptional than fewer people get a full bag.

Most roasters treat a coffee like this the same way: light, in the City to City+ range, chasing the bright citrus and floral notes dry process Ethiopians are famous for. Cupped that way, this lot is gorgeous — yuzu, mandarin, honeysuckle, fresh apricot, the kind of cup that reads almost like a washed coffee.

We wanted to see what would happen if we didn't play it safe. Our head cupper scored the lot 93 points, and instead of stopping at a light roast, we ran it through our fluid bed roaster to a full medium. The fruit didn't disappear, it transformed. What comes out the other side is darker and more decadent: cedar, dark chocolate, honey, and a red wine acidity that lingers on the finish. It's the same coffee, but it's telling a completely different story in the cup, and we think it's an even better one.

We didn't want to bury a coffee this good in our regular lineup. Angel's Reserve exists so that when something crosses our roastery that's genuinely rare, whether that's the score, the process, or the story behind it, we can hand it to you exactly as small and exactly as special as it actually is.

This Kercha Haruse is the first release wearing the black bag. It won't be the last, but it also won't last long. Grab an 8oz bag while it's here, and taste what a natural process Ethiopia looks like when it's pushed somewhere most roasters won't take it.

Sincerely, Angel