Royal.Coffee.Travel

A few weeks back, my boss and fearless leader, Bob Fulmer, asked me if I wanted to go to Ethiopia. "When are you thinking about going," I asked. "I don't know, pretty soon, maybe in a week or two, whenever we can get our Visa," he casually replied. "I'm there," said I. Just like that, my first trip to the birthplace of coffee and the cradle of mankind was underway. Sure enough, less than 24 hours after we had our passports in hand with the gaudy Ethiopian Visa stamped in place, we were airborne.

The vague intent of the trip was to meet with our suppliers and visit the coffee growing areas. I didn't really care. I just kept thinking Africa, flying over the Nile River, The vast Sahara Desert, driving through the Great Rift Valley, a whole new continent and coffee country I'd never seen. Not just any coffee country, but the place where coffee farming began possibly a thousand years ago, and where its cultivation and consumption are still sacred today. This was a frigging pilgrimage man!

Yes, so we arrived on the Dark Continent after 30 hours of flying and airport terminals. It really was dark, 3 A.M. The first smell I noticed after exiting the ultra swank and brand new Addis Airport was the re-assuring odor of animal dung, internationally recognized third world welcome mat; the modern and the pre-industrial side by side, an enduring theme throughout the trip. Even at this ungodly hour, the destitute were at work in the parking lot with their hands out, looking for anything from anyone, fair warning for the tough times we would witness over the next week.

Hours later as dawn turned to day, I ventured out to the streets of Addis, the capital city of over 3 million people. It wasn't dark at all, the tropical sun was blinding. Cars zigged and zagged maniacally on a huge thoroughfare with no lane markings in front of the national stadium, stopping only for the occasional herd of goats to cross the road. Again, the 21st and the 16th century in perfect harmony. As much as I relished this setting, we were here for coffee, so off we went to the East to the town of Dire Dawa, home of our revered exporter, Muhammad Abdullahi Ogsadey, shipper of the famed Ethiopian Mocha Harrar Horse (accept no substitutes!).
If you've followed our newsletters over the years you are familiar with Mr. Ogsadey, exporter of the Horse Harrar. He has legend status in Ethiopia, and at 85 years old he is still out there doing it, working daily, kicking ass, sharp as a tack. He met us at the airport in Dire Dawa and from that point on it was his show. He drove us to his house for a fine meal of goat and spaghetti. Try it, you'll like it. We were briefed on this year's crop and given a little history lesson from Ogsadey about Harrar coffee and the role he has played in its evolution since the 1940's.

He picked us up early the next day, and firmly behind the wheel, drove us out to the region of the Longberry Harrar coffee, several hours outside of Dire Dawa. His lovely Land Rover flew over the newly constructed highway, slowing only to evade the occasional lounging camel, donkey, cow, or goat. Driving further into the interior, the landscape became more and more arid and the terrain steeper. Looking at the hillsides, every arable inch of land had been farmed as centuries of terraces could be seen. It was on these hillsides and canyons that coffee sporadically grew, not in dense stands, but in tiny plots intermingled with the other crops grown by the families. Water is scarce here and it shows in the look of the coffee trees. It also explains why Harrar coffee is always naturally processed and never washed - there isn't water to spare for it.
We stopped in 2 different communities, both towns collection points where Ogsadey buys coffee and has storage and hulling facilities. He has operated here since the late 40's. We arrived on a Saturday, market day, and the towns were teeming with people. As we drove into the villages, chants of "Ogsadey, Ogsadey, Ogsadey" rang out, and easily over a hundred kids followed the car to Ogsadey's warehouse. As it turns out, the cultural and economic survival of these communities is largely due to Ogsadey. Back in the day before there were any decent roads, Ogsadey was the only man willing to drive back to these parts to buy coffee. The growers' loyalty to him has spanned generations, and he has returned the favor by building schools and mosques in the communities, and paying a fair price to the farmers for their coffee. His fairness and knowledge of the region virtually assure high quality and abundant supply of Horse Harrar.

Driving through the Harrar growing area, I noted every farm had a small stand of very healthy green shrubs that looked like tea bushes growing in front of the coffee. Some of these shrubs were even being irrigated and on some farms appeared to be displacing coffee entirely. This shrub is "qat" (Celastrus edulis) or "chat" as it is called in Ethiopia. The terminal branches of this shrub are snipped off and the delicate leaves are chewed, providing the chewer with an ethereal amphetamine-like buzz. To achieve this state, a good quantity of the leaves need be chewed over a span of an hour or so.

People have been growing and chewing qat for centuries in this part of the world, but its popularity has grown in recent years. While a good deal of the Harrar qat is actually exported to Somalia and Yemen, it is widely chewed in Harrar as well. I soon noticed virtually every male of adult age was chewing as well as many of the older women, while people everywhere were toting their little bundles of qat home in plastic produce bags for the afternoon chew. A sucker for stimulants (how the heck you think I ended up in the coffee business?), I decide to have myself a good chew on some freshly picked leaves. Chewing away on the ride back to Dire Dawa, I soon found myself speaking amharic and somalic with the driver, and found nothing at all unusual about the small station wagon we passed with the 5 goats in the back compartment and the 20 chickens tethered to the luggage rack on top. I awoke the next morning with a splitting headache and a dark green tongue. I stuck to coffee for the rest of the trip.

Following our visit with Mr. Ogsadey, we returned to Addis, to meet up with Mr. Tadesse Meskela, head of the Oromia Coffee Growers Cooperative, growers and suppliers of our Fair Trade Organic Yrgacheffe, Sidamo, and Natural Sidamo. We drove with him some 300 km to the south of Addis to the Yrgacheffe and Sidamo growing regions. It was a memorable drive, descending into the Great Rift Valley at the town of Mojo (neither Jim Morrison nor Austin Powers were sighted) and following it south for hours, past huge lakes, termite mounds, and an endless stream of livestock and barefoot herders. It is in this Valley that the skeletal remains of man's earliest ancestors were found.

The hours in the car allowed for Tadesse to explain how the cooperative was born and how it functions. Like cooperatives in other parts of the world, it was put together to give the growers more control over their produce, and to realize a larger chunk of the final export price as their own. Though they were formed only in the late 1990's, membership has grown to 23,691 members in the 35 separate cooperatives that comprise the Oromia Cooperative as a whole. The cooperatives exist in all of the major growing regions of Ethiopia - Limu/Djimma, Sidamo/Yrgacheffe, and Harrar. Once organized, the growers were able to have their crop certified organic and become certified with FLO as Fair Trade. That membership levels are climbing in every co-op is testament to the success of the model.

Eventually we climbed out of the valley into a setting of lush green mountains and shortly the first stands of coffee were seen as we entered into the Sidamo region. Coffee production here begins at 1500 meters, just where it ends in most of Central America. Whereas Harrar was arid, Sidamo was clearly blessed with a generous amount of rainfall, as attested to by the red laterite soils and the dense shade canopies and foliage. The abundant water supply allows for the "wet processing" of coffee, and why Yrgacheffe and Sidamo are primarily "washed" coffees. Like in Harrar, the farms are very small, but here they all support shade, citrus, hardwood and avocado trees, and the cultivation of qat was infrequent.
We visited 2 cooperatives, 1 each in both the Yrgacheffe and Sidamo areas. It should be clarified that Yrgacheffe is actually a micro-region within the Sidamo region. Picture a fried egg with the yolk in the middle of the white - that is Yrgacheffe inside of Sidamo. Yrgacheffe radiates out from the town of the same name, and describes an area growing coffee between 1700-2300 meters with undefined but generally understood borders. Meanwhile, Sidamo coffee grows in virtually identical conditions but is harvested in a broader area and up to 200 meters lower. While a Yrgacheffe should be a consistently great coffee, virtually indiscernible coffees can also be found in Sidamo.

The cooperative's growers all have their coffee cherry processed together in newly constructed wet mills, built with funds obtained through selling their coffee at Fair Trade prices. The mill we visited in Sidamo where our coffee comes from was located at over 1800 meters! The coffees are then 100% sun dried on raised drying racks, and meticulously hand sorted. The pergamino is then trucked down to Addis to a giant dry mill for final export processing and cup testing. The detailed recordkeeping maintained for all member growers is staggering, and the allocation of funds and payment to growers is well displayed. From our view, the Fair Trade coop system is functioning well here, and is producing excellent certified organic coffee from clearly delineated and defined areas, true "appellation" coffees.

I spent the final day of the trip back in Addis. The shy country women with their colorful robes and headdress were replaced with midriff-bearing beauties, and over used wells replaced with tap water. Still, the barefoot poor were everywhere and goats were as common as ever. I paid a visit to the Central Coffee Processing Plant, the dry mill where all washed coffees must pass through for final export preparation and cup testing and where the daily auctions take place. The place was big enough to build about 10 Boeing 747's inside, and literally hundreds of trucks loaded with pergamino waited in chaotic queues to be unloaded and weighed. Meanwhile, the cupping lab was an island of sanity and control where every single lot of coffee is cupped and rated. They tried to test me with 5 unidentified coffees from the different growing regions throughout the country. I nailed every one of them and guessed altitude to within 100 meters. I guess there is no place like the Royal Coffee cupping room to hone your skills and see everything Ethiopia has to offer.

After spending this memorable week in the birthplace of coffee, I once again feel great about our sources. The new crop arrivals have just begun, but I am looking forward to another stellar year of Ethiopian deliveries from Harrar, Sidamo, and Yrgacheffe from our friend Mr. Ogsadey and the folks at Oromia. While I don't think I'll have any problems laying off the qat, I think I'm pretty well hooked on goat. Goats and coffee. Isn't this how it all started?
-John Cossette