
Photo by Ami Vitale
In Ethiopia, coffee is prepared and served in an elaborate three-part ritual.
Photos by Ami Vitale
Ethiopia’s Kaffa region is considered the birthplace of coffee.
A writer travels to the Horn of Africa to find the source of a global obsession.
The first thing Azeb wanted to know about me was if I was on Facebook. After that she got to the less important stuff: Where I was from, if I was married, had kids, believed in God—and what was I doing in southern Ethiopia? Azeb, a 25-year-old business student with big glowing eyes and long dark hair, was born and raised not far from where we were having breakfast. We ended up sitting together when we realized we were the only people in the dining room at the Lesiwon Hotel in Yirgacheffe, the namesake town of a region known to coffee cognoscenti for producing some of Ethiopia’s highest-quality coffee beans.
As Azeb scooped up pieces of her omelet with torn-off hunks of bread, as is the Ethiopian custom, I stabbed at mine with a fork and told her about my travels thus far in her country. But it was something I mentioned in passing that seriously broke the ice. Until this trip—specifically the day prior to our chance encounter, when I had driven down from Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, to the southern part of the country—I had never seen a coffee tree.
Coffee is to Ethiopia what hops are to Bohemia or grapes to Bordeaux.
Azeb’s mouth fell open, her head tilted heavenward, and she let out a high-pitched laugh. “You’d never seen a coffee cherry before?” she said, and then she just stared at me, her mouth still agape, as if I’d just casually asked her if airplanes drive on invisible roads in the sky.
Coffee is to Ethiopia what hops are to Bohemia or grapes to Bordeaux. That is, coffee is almost everything, from the cornerstone of the community’s economic fortunes to the lifeblood of its social relations. Java drinking is so deeply rooted here that Azeb was dumbstruck that I could have lived 40 years on the planet never having seen what coffee looks like before it’s plucked, peeled, dried, roasted, and ground.
Which is exactly why I was in Ethiopia. I wanted to travel around this East African country’s primary coffee-growing regions and immerse myself in its coffee culture. I can sit around at coffeehouses in New York and San Francisco drinking all the Ethiopian coffee my brain can take before spinning out of control. But I was curious about the time and toil it takes to produce these beans, everything that goes into slaking the States’ obsessive thirst for small-batch artisan roasts.
After all, great coffee is harvested all over the world—in Guatemala, Colombia, Indonesia, Kenya, and Rwanda, for example—but no coffee-producing country on earth can match the variety that grows in Ethiopia. By some estimates, nearly 99 percent of the world’s arabica coffee can be traced to Ethiopia. Moreover, according to aficionados, it’s here that some of the best coffee in the world is being produced.“People will go hungry rather than give up their daily coffee rituals.”
Assefa promised to teach me how to drink like an Ethiopian. Year after year, the nation is consistently one of the largest coffee exporters in the world and the largest in Africa. Ethiopians, however, drink about half of all the coffee they produce, preparing and serving it in an elaborate ritual that distinguishes their coffee-growing culture from all others. On my way to meet Assefa at his home, I walked through Addis’s upscale Bole Road neighborhood, where the wide streets are flanked by newly built hotels and countless coffee shops, each one packed with men and women sitting around nursing macchiatos.
At Assefa’s two-story house, he and his housekeeper were poised to show me how Ethiopians have classically drunk coffee. Within seconds of my arrival, the housekeeper went to work: She lit coals and set a jabena, a traditional coffeepot that looks like a sort of lantern or bottle where a genie might live, on top of the coals to boil the water. Then she rested a pan with green (unroasted) coffee beans atop another container of burning coals. Finally, she lit some incense—frankincense—and the coffee making was in full swing. As large plumes of the scented smoke swirled toward the ceiling, Assefa and I chatted about coffee’s role in Ethiopian culture.
“It’s deeply spiritual,” he said. “Just look at the incense that is burned every time we make coffee. And is it a coincidence that monks played a role in discovering coffee?” As legend has it, a ninth-century goatherd named Kaldi noticed his flock “dancing” one day. When he realized the goats had been eating the cherries on a tree, he took some of the fruit to a nearby monastery, and the monks there began chewing on it as a pick-me-up. And coffee, so the story has been retold countless times, was born. “This drink,” Assefa said, gesturing toward the housekeeper, who was now crushing the roasted beans with a mortar and pestle, “exemplifies Ethiopia more than anything else.”
Coffee is so significant to Ethiopia that, Assefa told me, it’s a matter of national security. “It’s our most valued commodity,” he said, “accounting for around 30 percent of our exports. With the money we make from coffee, we are able to buy weapons and medicine.” This is why the government regulates the coffee industry, making sure the best beans of all get exported. And this is why, ironically, experiencing the finest product the Ethiopian coffee industry has to offer might mean drinking it in Minneapolis or Madrid instead of Addis Ababa.ADVERTISEMENT
A couple days after my afternoon with Assefa, for example, I was sitting with eight locals in a small living-room-cum-coffee-shop in the Yirgacheffe region. As incense wafted between us, its scent blending with that of the roasting coffee, we needed something to do while we waited. So we talked. The entire process was slow and purposeful and intimate. While the woman (and it’s always a woman) roasted and crushed the beans, we were forced to slow down, to chat, to pay attention, and to get to know one another. I began to see a social component to what Assefa had described as coffee’s spiritual nature, and to understand what he meant when he told me, “People will go hungry rather than give up their daily coffee rituals.”
The second phase of my coffee journey involved traveling around southern Ethiopia with Geoff Watts, co-owner and green-coffee buyer for the Los Angeles– and Chicago-based roaster Intelligentsia Coffee.
We spent several days navigating the bumpy back roads of the Sidama Zone, the traditional homeland of the Sidama people, passing through mud-hut villages where children went into “It’s the ice cream man!”– like hysterics as we cruised by. They ran alongside our truck and yelled, “Farenji, farenji, farenji!” (approximately, “white face!”), and chanted somewhat more cryptically, “You, you, you, you, you, you!”
Our destinations were coffee-washing stations, the centers where farmers bring in their just-plucked cherry (the fruit that surrounds the coffee bean, always referred to in the singular) to be stripped, fermented, soaked, and dried. The stations, almost always set on a slope, consisted of a machine that de-pulped the cherry and a dozen or so 100-foot-long tables where the pits (the coffee beans) would dry in the shade for a few days. At each stop, as soon as we’d climb out of the truck, about 40 farmers would gather around. At the first washing station we visited, I got to see Watts, a 39-year-old with brown sideburns stretching down below his earlobes, in action.Coffee, it turns out, touches a lot of hands.
This was Watts’s umpteenth trip to the Sidama Zone to scout out coffee. He spends up to eight months a year venturing into remote coffee territories around the world and cultivating personal business relationships with farmers. Third Wave roasters and retailers such as Intelligentsia distinguish themselves from mass producers and Second Wave businesses (such as Starbucks) by presenting coffee as an artisanal foodstuff. Further, Intelligentsia has pioneered the concept of direct trade—buying coffee directly from individual farmers. Unlike Fair Trade—a global, standardized certification system that guarantees organized farming groups a minimum floor price for their products—direct trade, as practiced by Intelligentsia, aims to build a sustainable business model based on individual relationships between roaster and farmer, and the assurance that farmers will always get a better-than-market price for their coffee.
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After Watts delivered his spiel at the washing station, he looked over at a farmer who had just turned up with a wicker basket full of cherry. “Oh, these don’t look very good,” he said. “You see, if you let all these green, unripe cherry go through the process, it’s going to create low-quality coffee. It’s like a 10-egg omelet—one bad egg will ruin the whole thing. I know you want to make money by bringing in all your cherry—ripe or not so ripe—but trust me, you’ll eventually make more money if you sort through this and include only the ripe cherry. That will produce very high-quality coffee. And you’ll get an above-market rate for it.” The farmer hung his head and slunk away, wicker basket in hand.
Watts’s twofold mission is to buy the best coffee directly from the farmers and to help those farmers become better growers who provide a consistent product. The Ethiopian government, in its attempt to regulate the coffee industry, had inadvertently put a roadblock in Watts’s path by requiring that all coffee be sold through the Economic Commission Exchange in Addis Ababa. In general, the ECX made it easier for foreign coffee companies to buy beans. But for the handful of specialty coffee buyers like Watts, the regulation made it nearly impossible to trace the provenance of beans back to an individual farm. After the law was in place, one could follow the trail only as far back as a region or, at best, the washing station where as many as 1,000 farmers might drop off their cherry to be processed. Fortunately, an exception permits someone like Watts to bypass the ECX and buy directly from registered cooperative unions and single-estate owners. This allows Watts to promote not just the region, not just the local washing station, but individual farms and small cooperatives.Sign up for the Daily Wander newsletter for expert travel inspiration and tips
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