Worka Winey Ethiopia

E. Worka Winey
The town of Worka is located in the southern part of the Yirgacheffe region in the Gedeb woreda.

Most people around Worka work in agricultural sectors, and coffee is the oldest and best paying cash crop. Small scale growers, some of whom own less than an acre of land, bring their cherries to community washing stations at Worka for processing.


Coffees from Worka are grown at around 1900 meters above sea level on average, and the elevation combined with their perfect geographical location makes for some of the cleanest and most consistent coffees in the region.

The Worka washing station, with 360 drying beds on nearly 5 hectares of land and 596 smallholder producers contributing coffee.

It was built in 2008 and processes up to 1.5 million kg of red cherry per year. Many improvements to the facility have been made in the past two years. Worka coffee is prepped for export coffee cleaning and storage plant on 30,000 sq meters of land in Addis Ababa.

All the processing jobs are mechanical and electronic including final hand picking on conveyor belts. The six storage silos of the plant have a capacity of accommodating about 15,000 metric tons of coffee at a time. The warehouses are clean, with ample lighting and ventilation, which are very ideal for keeping the quality of the coffee.



Anaerobic (oxygen-free) fermentation is a relatively new method in which coffee is processed in a completely closed, oxygen-deprived fermentation tank.


First, the cherries are separated from their pulp and aqueous mucilage. Then it is taken into an airtight fermentation tank and the process is started with its own mucilage water (honey water). This water naturally contains wild yeasts from coffee plantations and natural sugars to fuel fermentation.



Thanks to the rapid consumption of oxygen in the environment and the production of carbon dioxide, the progressing process continues as the high pressure created forces the different aromas and flavors in the mucilage to pass through the coffee bean membrane.

After 18-24 hours, the beans are carefully removed from the tank and dried to ensure that the fermentation step is stopped.