Sidamo Nansebo Bulga G1 FW - Ethiopia

This exceptional fully washed coffee was dry milled and exported by Primrose, PLC. The coffee was grown by smallholder farmers living around the kabele (town) of Bulga, in Oromia County.

Most contributing farmers own less than a hectare of land, and they grow coffee simply as a backyard cash crop. Coffee will usually be interspersed with other subsistence crops, such as sweet potato, mangos and avocados, but there are no other primary cash crops grown in the region.

Income from coffee is important but minimal for most farmers due to the small size of their farms. As such, inputs are minimal – most coffee grown in the region is 100% organic, though not certified, as farmers simply don’t have the money to apply chemical fertilisers, pesticides or herbicides.

Primrose pays more than the market price per kilogram of red cherry, and those farmers that bring quality cherry are paid a cash incentive, ensuring higher-than-average overall quality. Coffee is hand-picked before being delivered to the mill collection points, usually within 5 km of the producers’ homes. Great care is taken upon delivery to separate out any overripe, under ripe or damaged beans before consolidating with other lots for the road to the wet mill.

At least once a day, the collected coffee cherry is delivered to the mill, where it is floated and pulped. Cherries are usually pulped on the same day that they are picked (usually in the evening/night) and sorted into three grades by weight (heavy, medium and floaters). Next, they are delivered to a fermentation tank, where they ferment for 66 to 72 hours depending on the climate at the time. Fermentation times are quite long here due to the altitude, which makes for cooler climates. After fermentation, the coffee is fully washed through grading channels and is then delivered to dry usually on African beds, where they are likely hand-sorted by women. Once here, the parchment is turned regularly and protected from hot sun between 12:00 and 15:00 every day until it reaches the optimal humidity, at which point it is bagged and rested.

Varieties of coffee grown here are traditionally referred to as ‘heirloom’ – a catchall terminology which often masks the wide assortment of varieties that may be present within various regions…even, within farms. Many of these varieties will have been developed by Ethiopia’s Jimma Agricultural Resarch Centre (JARC), which, since the late 1960s, has worked to develop resistant and tasty varieties for the Ethiopian coffee industry and also to provide the agricultural extension training needed to cultivate them. The dual factors of Ethiopian Commodity Exchange (ECX) forced anonymisation of lots (see below) combined with the relatively low awareness of formal variety names outside Ethiopia has meant that the JARC’s work has historically been under-recognised by specialty importers and roasters, but a new book issued by Counter Culture Coffee in the USA (2018/19) has drawn new attention to the topic, and rightly so.

It is important to note that varieties in Ethiopia fall within two main groups – regional or local landraces (of which there are at least 130, 33 of which would hail from the Southern growing regions) or JARC varieties. It is still very hard to tell but it is highly likely that this lot contains a great percentage of JARC 740110 and 74112 varieties, developed in 1974 by the JARC, which are directly descended from local landraces indigenous to the Gedeo Region. Most farmers have a mix of both the improved and the indigenous landrace varieties (inherited from parents and grandparents) on their farms, though research by Counter Culture’s Getu Bekele does show that there is a strong concentration of the JARC ’74 varieties.

Our recognition of these processes as an industry, admittedly, lags behind. Though the arguments made by Getu Bekele are correct and salient, it remains difficult to get information from mills and exporters regarding the exact varieties that go into various lots. Mercanta will continue to work with our partners in Ethiopia on this important issue, and we hope that in coming year we will be able to provide more detailed information on the distinct varieties being grown by the farmers contributing to our Ethiopian lots.

About the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange and Traceability:

For many years, Ethiopian coffee, some of the best in the world, was for the most part untraceable.

Starting in 2008, Ethiopia began the centralization of all coffee exports through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange (ECX), where the coffees were ‘anonymised’, stripped of any information other than region, in the interest of the farmers, who were meant to receive top dollar for quality regardless of the ‘name’ of the washing station or farm. Coffees moving through the ECX were delivered to certified coffee labs, where they were cupped according to profile then graded and marked generically for export. This ‘equalising’ measure certainly benefitted some producers, but it had the negative impact of eliminating most roasters’ and importers’ ability to provide accurate information of the precise traceability of coffees. Even after the opening of the ‘second window’ (devised for direct sales of cooperative and certified coffee), as of the end of 2017 some 90 percent of coffees still moved through the ECX.

The end of March 2017 saw a huge overturning of this mandatory system. In a bill raised by the Ethiopian Coffee & Tea Development and Marketing Authority, Ethiopian coffee (even that sold through the ECX) can be marketed and sold with full traceability intact. The aim is to limit black market dealings, to demand higher prices and to enable Ethiopian producers to share in a greater piece of the pie.

In a bit more detail, the new system allows any exporter with a valid license to sell directly to buyers without placing the coffee on the ECX first. There is a slight caveat – the parchment coffee will have to be sold within three days of arriving at the processing plant in Addis. If it is still unsold after three days (which is quite likely), it must be sold through the ECX: BUT with its traceability info intact rather than being deleted. Additionally, it is proposed that oversees companies will be able to plant and sell coffee, though this is still undetermined as of 2018/19’s harvest.

Update: As of September 2019, The Ethiopian government and the European Union have officially announced the beginning of a €15 million five-year program, designed to boost the Ethiopian coffee sector. The program, named EU-Coffee Action for the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (EUCAFE), focuses on Ethiopia’s primary growing regions, namely; Oromia, Southern Nations Nationalities and Peoples (SSNPR) and Amhara. The project aims to tackle a number of objectives, including; food security and health for vulnerable populations, improving farmer access to credit, technical assistance and inputs, marketing and strengthening premium market channels, climate change mitigation and involving more women and youth.