The emphatic chanting of a preacher shepherding his flock echoes off the hum of the evening call to prayer at the mosque on the hill. A strange counterpoint to the snap and crack of branches bending to the weight of colobus monkeys playing tag in the canopy overhead. They aren’t dancing goats, but they do seem a little more energetic than usual.
It’s the tail end of a marathon day, taking in and learning from the farmers, producers, technicians, and experts who are currently tasked with maintaining the legacy of the origin of coffee. Quite a tall order.
You’re joining me and Victor Pagan in the southern Oromia region, and you may recognize the names of a few places we’re visiting here: Sidama, Yirgacheffe, Guji, and Gedeo. We’re on a week-long mission to talk with some farmers who are part of the Single Farmer Project, stopping at washing stations to learn about their operations and innovations, and collecting media for our Beanologies along the way. It’s my first time in Ethiopia, and I brought all the starry-eyed deference one expects from a coffee nerd making the pilgrimage.
Long before the beverage we know, the berries of coffea arabica were used as a staple food in Ethiopia. Ground up and mixed with clarified butter (ghee) and rolled into a ball, the mixture was a perfect revitalizing snack for workers in the field, travelers on a long journey, or, as lore has it, later by those with heavy eyelids who needed to stay alert during evening prayer. By the 14th century, coffee’s use as a stimulant was a part of everyday life, and people were experimenting with other ways to consume it. These early cultural uses set the stage for coffee’s social and spiritual role in Ethiopian society¹.
Fast forward a couple hundred years (please excuse me for skipping some major historical events in this time; the history here could fill volumes), and coffee had spread to Yemen, where the conquering Ottoman Turks began to build supply chains to support the proliferation of coffee houses popping up in the Middle East, Asia, and soon Europe, with coffee blended from Ethiopia and the surrounding regions. Cafe culture was taking shape, and as they say, the rest is history, with the early coffee economy developing as colonization drove plantation-style farming far and wide to many of the coffee-growing countries we know today².
However, coffee growing and consumption in Ethiopia remained unchanged for much of the late 18th and early 19th century. It was still grown as a sustenance and cash crop in backyard gardens, while drinking it became segregated along religious lines. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church had banned coffee consumption among Christians, viewing it with suspicion as a Muslim drink. Coffee’s use was largely confined to Islamic communities (for instance, in the cities of Harar and Jimma) and was associated with Sufi rituals and the everyday social life of Ethiopian Muslims. This changed dramatically in the late 1800s under Emperor Menelik II. Recognizing coffee’s importance, Menelik II (who ruled 1889–1913) took bold steps to integrate coffee into the national culture and economy. He openly drank coffee in public, effectively ending the church’s taboo and signaling that coffee was acceptable, even patriotic, for all Ethiopians. With the support of Abuna Matewos (the head of the Orthodox Church at that time), Menelik allayed clergy fears about the consumption of coffee, framing it not as a Muslim vice but as a unifying beverage for the empire³.
The wall of awards proudly on display.
A wisp of smoke rises from the fire as the Jebena (the traditional coffee carafe) is sent around the room again. The earthen walls glint with medals and awards from the light of a nearby door, and Mr. Zelelu laughs as I attempt to pantomime that I do, in fact, like kocho, a bread made of fermented enset fibres and staple food in rural Ethiopia. Mr. Zelelu proudly passes us his guest book, opened to a page from 2013, when Jason (CEO – Cafe Imports) visited and left his mark, not just in this book but on the early stages of what has now developed into the Single Farmer Project (check out this deep dive on the project). A lot has changed in the coffee trade around here in the last 30 years. To understand just how drastic this has been, we need to delve a bit into the history that led us to Mr. Zelelu’s doorstep.
During the Derg regime (1974–1991), the state tightly controlled coffee marketing. Production was nationalized, and farmers were required to sell coffee to the government at fixed (subsidized) prices. Facing uncertainty of their land rights, producing excess for the market and quality were disincentivized, and private trading or exporting was essentially prohibited under this centralized system. But coffee was still an economic lifeline, forcing the government to maintain exports by any means to earn much-needed foreign currency.
At these auctions, exporters (now privately licensed companies) would bid on lots graded by the Coffee Liquoring Unit (a quality control body) but could only see origin and grade info. This traditional auction system ensured coffee quality oversight but also meant traceability to specific farmers was limited, as coffees from many farms were blended by region. But it was a step in the right direction with Ethiopia’s coffee, once mostly a bulk commodity, starting to be marketed by region and even micro-region, highlighting its diverse terroir.
Dry parchment being consolidated into bigger station specific lots. Coffee still in parchment bagged and tagged before making the journey to Addis Ababa for final screening and sorting.
A major turning point came in 2008 with the creation of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX). The ECX replaced the old auction system with a modern trading floor intended to improve efficiency, standardize grading, and speed up payments for all agricultural products⁴. By 2009, coffee trading was integrated into the ECX, which required most producers to sell through designated ECX markets. While the ECX brought faster payments and price transparency, it also initially stripped away detailed origin traceability since coffee was pooled by region and quality grade. International buyers of specialty coffee raised concerns that they could no longer trace Ethiopian coffees to specific micro-regions or estates, potentially lowering the value of unique origin coffees. This pride amongst farmers of the coffee–growing areas we know and love today is marked by border controls along the roads that pass through. These makeshift screening points check vehicles and ensure coffees from one region aren’t mixed and exported as produced in another.
A moto passes under a border checkpoint between Gedeo and Sidama.
Notably, some exceptions to ECX existed: cooperative unions (federations of farmer cooperatives) and large estate farms were allowed to bypass the ECX and export directly under certain conditions even before 2008. These exceptions acknowledged the importance of direct relationships for specialty coffee, even as most of the sector (around 88%) remained within the ECX system.
By the mid-2010s, Ethiopia’s government recognized the need to reform the coffee marketing and licensing system further to remain competitive globally (partially driven by a trademark battle with Starbucks⁵, but that’s another tale). In 2015, the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Development and Marketing Authority, now generally called the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority (ECTA), was re-established to strengthen oversight and development of the coffee sector. The pivotal moment came with the Coffee Marketing and Quality Control Proclamation No. 1051/2017, which aimed to “liberalize” the coffee trade and introduced the possibility of widespread vertical integration.
Effective in 2017, and just in time for Claudia Bellinzoni (Cafe Imports – Senior Green Buyer for Ethiopia) to revitalize the Single Farmer Project. This law ended the absolute requirement that all private coffee exports go through the ECX. Private coffee processors, smallholders, and cooperatives could vertically integrate for the first time, handling the export themselves rather than relying on middlemen or the ECX. This dramatic reshaping of the licensing landscape carved out new roles and ways of doing business:
These reforms over the last decade have opened the door for farmers like Mr. Zelelu to grow. Today, he’s processing not only his crop but also nearby neighbors at his own micro washing station as a licensed grower-exporter. But this open-door policy has also brought immense competition.
The universal sign of commerce, the scale.
“Washing station” is a broad term for a place that collects (aggregates) and processes coffee to prep it for the journey to dry milling. Be that natural, honey, washed, or, more recently, anaerobic and experimental fermentations (read more about processing over here). A washing station might be small and owned by a farmer-exporter like Mr. Zelelu or Mrs. Tigest (view Single Farmer Project coffees), a private exporter, or they could be part of a network of washing stations owned by a larger vertically integrated company or cooperative. Of course, there’s room for all different business models in between. Since the 2017 proclamation, there’s been an explosion of new washing stations constructed, opening accessibility to new techniques and improving overall quality while providing other fringe benefits to nearby communities. As aggregators, a washing station will often buy and process coffee from hundreds or even thousands of farms, making them an economic hub that not only buys coffee but also hires local laborers for processing and often is a source for agronomic and technical assistance.
I’ve never seen natural processing done at the scale we are seeing. Hundreds of raised beds full of cherry ranging in color from, well, cherry red to a deep maroon cover the hillside that pitches gently down to a wide river. It’s beautiful! Yaye washing station is newly constructed, and it shows. The washing channels and tanks are meticulous, and rows of fresh barrels are prepped for anaerobic fermentation. The site is surrounded by towering basina trees that obscure the rolling hills covered in farms and grazing pastures beyond. Between four hundred to six hundred farmers sell their coffee here each year, and the washing station itself employs around a hundred workers during harvest to make the processing all happen. Being near multiple villages, workers are a mix of seasonal laborers and often family members. It’s not uncommon to see primarily women weighing incoming coffee, sorting, turning over the drying beds, and generally keeping the operation of the washing station going. At Yaye, they also compost pulp and mucilage waste, and their new experiments with vermiculture are going strong, all of which will become fertilizer distributed back to the farms.
As we sit around a small table in the shade of the storage house at the station, I’m trying not to make a mess of eating shiro wot (a chickpea stew) and misir wot (stewed lentils) with nothing but injera (a slightly sour teff flour flat bread) for utensils. It’s not pretty as I go for another swirl with the bread, trying to find the perfect combination of sweet, spicy, sour, and spongy texture that I find irresistible. In the pauses of conversation with our companions, I think about how this is a near-perfect analogy for why I first fell in love with coffee from Ethiopia. It’s the deep-rooted methods steeped in tradition, the unknowns that come with massive genetic diversity found in arabica here, the jammy aroma of natural processing taking hold, and the emergent results in flavor when they all combine.
It’s apparent that evolution is well underway, with access to previously novel processing methods and farms renovating with disease-resistant cultivars, all putting a new twist on the classic blueberry hits. On our journey, we see more and more of the international hallmark of anaerobic and honey processing experiments: blue fermentation barrels. The legacy raised drying beds made famous in East Africa sport new shade control mechanisms to slow and stabilize the drying process and encourage uniformity. Washing stations are being built at a record pace in more remote areas, bringing these innovations with them.
Fermentation barrels at the ready. Shifting from traditional natural processing puts new strain on water supplies and can raise concerns of downstream ecological impacts, making post-processing water treatment critical.
The tires howl as we slip and slide along the muddy road toward our destination in Guji, Wolichu Wachu washing station. Coffee moves by truck, moto, horse, cart, and everything in between on these arteries, linking remote farms and washing stations to Addis Ababa and, ultimately, the trains that haul it all to the port in Djibouti. These roadsides are where commerce happens. Rough-hewn hardwood planks for construction, enset bales for making kocho (one of many uses), teff straw for insulation and feed, motorcycle repair, shoe repair, sewing machines whirring in the open air under the guidance of tailors making alterations to clothing; it’s a colorful blur that makes up the observable surface we only witness for a moment as we pass by.
Roads are as much an opportunity to buy or sell as they are about getting somewhere.
Climbing over the pass at Llalcha, we hit 2900m in elevation and have a clear view to the southeast into Guji. On this visit, we’re limited in how far we can go down this road by its ruggedness, but also the ongoing civil unrest⁶ further south near the border with Borena. Makeshift checkpoints on the road and guards at many washing stations are reminders that coffee, commerce, and conflict often intersect.
Coffee is moved in all sorts of ways.
Wolichu Wachu sits on a sloping plateau in a broad valley at the end of the “road”, about a four-hour drive from the nearest main “road”. Between the thatched droplet-shaped houses that make up the surrounding villages, the creek flowing at the bottom of the valley, and the vibrant magenta soil giving way to fields of crops and cattle, it’s an incredibly tranquil place. As the station manager so succinctly put it:
We have an inherent respect for people and nature. We all grew up here and live in nature, so we have a belief that it {nature} is life.
The nearby communities grow the coffee processed here, and it’s the primary collection point for coffee’s journey back up the valley. It’s remote, with teff, wheat, and barley for subsistence crops and horses or donkeys as a means of transportation if you aren’t on your own two feet. More than ever, I’m reminded that coffee makes up an important but single strand in the tapestry of everyday life necessities.
There are more than 15 million smallholders producing coffee in Ethiopia⁷, growing in “garden” style systems, which is essentially organic agroforestry. Farmers use little to no synthetic fertilizer (over 78% of Ethiopian smallholders use organic compost instead), and they often maintain shade canopy with indigenous trees (Sidama farmers commonly have diverse shade species, giving ~50% canopy cover) or intercrop with maize, beans, or enset. This polyculture supports biodiversity and healthy soils, ultimately making farms more ecologically resilient. However, this lack of synthetic inputs and the prevalence of older heirloom trees contribute to relatively lower yields by global standards. In a good year with some rejuvenation effort, garden farms might reach ~800 kg/ha of green coffee, which works out to a small part of a family’s overall income when coffee prices are low and inflation is high.
To cope with this, there’s a rising trend in the southern highlands of shifting into alternative cash crops like khat, a stimulant which can be grown and harvested year-round and is more resilient to climate stress than coffee. It’s an alluring option, though antithetical to traditional subsistence gardening methods, with some significant environmental and social downsides, something we have seen in recently cleared-cut fields being prepared.
The intricate internal structure of a traditional woven house.
Finding a balance between tradition, innovation, and necessity is hard to grapple with. The challenges facing everyone in the coffee-value chain here are vast: shifting labor patterns as the incoming generation looks for opportunity outside of agriculture, spiraling inflation rates and currency reliance, land fragmentation as land is subdivided amongst heirs, urban migration, in-migration as laborers come from other areas drawn by seasonal picking and processing jobs on larger farms or washing stations, alternative cash crops and artisanal mining. All these economic shifts are gradually redefining the roles and expectations within farming communities. It feels like coffee is amid an evolution that is both as painful and beautiful as its past.
The contrast is palpable as we sip a Cup of Excellence-awarded coffee at a shop back in Addis Ababa, far from rolling fields of teff, the scent of drying coffee, and the clay jebena warming on the fire.
Today, if you bring up Ethiopia in a group of coffee folks, you’re likely to get at least one waxing poetic about how a blueberry flavor explosion made them the specialty coffee drinker they are today (I’ll admit – I’m one of them). This reputation for enlightening coffees may be rooted in a deep cultural history, but its future is still being written, and we’re just starting to experience all the potential the source of coffee has to offer.
View the many offerings from Ethiopia’s latest harvest now. Some arrive soon, with more following behind. We can’t wait to share the recent season with you.