From Ridge to Richness: The Rise of Gedeb’s Worka Chelchele

There’s a corner of Ethiopia where the altitude climbs, the air thins, and the coffee sings. This is Gedeb—more precisely, Banko Chelchele—a rising star in the world of specialty coffee that’s challenging traditional maps and rewriting flavor expectations.

Perched between 1900 and 2100 meters above sea level, Banko Chelchele sits at the confluence of the Gedeo and Guji Zones. It’s a place where commerce, culture, and coffee collide, producing some of the most electrifying cup profiles in Ethiopia. And at the center of this new frontier is the Worka Chelchele washing station—a facility as ambitious as the landscape it occupies.

Built in 2021 and spanning 2.5 hectares, Worka Chelchele is a modern processing hub that gathers cherry from 396 smallholder farmers across the surrounding hillsides. These aren’t monoculture plantations—they’re vibrant family farms, where coffee trees share space with enset, maize, and other staples of daily life. Each farmer’s contribution adds to a collective narrative that’s as rich and layered as the coffee itself.

What makes Worka Chelchele stand out isn’t just the altitude or the variety—though it helps that these beans are indigenous landraces adapted to the region’s unique climate. It’s the meticulous processing that elevates this coffee from good to unforgettable. Cherries are depulped, fermented for 48 hours, washed with fresh water, soaked again, and then dried on more than 250 raised beds. The result is a fully washed coffee with dazzling clarity, bright acidity, and fruit-forward elegance.

The station is owned by Tadesse Desta Import & Export, a company that exemplifies a new wave of Ethiopian exporters: small, agile, and quality-obsessed. Their dry mill in Addis Ababa uses electronic sorters to fine-tune every lot, and they’re pushing for organic and Rainforest Alliance certifications. Their vision for Worka Chelchele includes future expansions into honey and anaerobic processing—more ways to showcase the terroir’s untapped potential.

But the real story here is Gedeb itself. Long considered an outlier, this region is proving it belongs in the conversation with Yirgacheffe, Guji, and beyond. Worka Chelchele is not just a washing station—it’s a statement. A bold declaration that Ethiopia’s coffee future is growing in places still unpinned on most maps.

Taste it for yourself, and you’ll understand: from ridge to richness, Gedeb is just getting started.