Ethiopia Coffee Quotes

The names of coffee beans mostly derive from where they are grown. In the case of mocha, the beans are grown in Yemen and Ethiopia and named after Yemen’s port city of Mocha, where they were traditionally shipped from. Kilimanjaro beans are grown in Tanzania

Ethiopia is the center of origin and diversity for the majority of coffee we drink. The commodification of coffee pushes farmers to grow as much as possible by whatever means possible. This has contributed to deforestation. The place where coffee was born - the area with the greatest biodiversity of coffee anywhere in the world - could disappear. No forest, no coffee. No coffee, no forest. What we lose isn't specific to Ethiopia; it impacts us all.

Continuity is in the eye of the beholder. Commodity is a matter of perception. Coffee can be Folgers or it can be terroir: the regions where beans are grown span continents and microclimates, lumping them together under a single label is as silly as lumping together Ethiopia and Brazil, or jungle and mountains. To anyone who bothered to look, the idea of a unified commodity coffee called Folgers was an invention based on simplifying trade.

The changed relationship may be seen in a simple example, that traditional Middle-Eastern indulgence, a cup of coffee. Coffee originally came from Ethiopia. It was brought up both shores of the Red Sea, through Arabia and Egypt, to Syria and to Turkey, and then exported to Europe. Sugar came from Persia and India. For a long time, both coffee and sugar were imports to Europe, either through or from the Middle East. But then the colonial powers found that they could grow coffee and sugar more abundantly and more cheaply in their new colonies. They did this so thoroughly and successfully that they began to export coffee and sugar to the Ottoman lands. By the end of the eighteenth century, if a Turk or Arab took the traditional indulgence, a cup of sweetened coffee, in all probability the coffee came from Dutch Java or Spanish America, the sugar from the British or French West Indies; only the hot water was local. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, even that ceased to be true, as European concessionary companies took over the water supply and gas supply in Middle Eastern cities.

Making an elixir out of coffee beans was probably invented in Ethiopia, where the plant is endemic. From there, beans, still in their skins, mixed with animal fat, were traded to Yemen, right across the Red Sea from Ethiopia.

It’s millions of dead people too, like the guy who first forged steel, and the goatherd in ancient Ethiopia who noticed his goats started dancing after eating a particular plant, and decided to try the coffee beans himself. At least that’s the legend.

The third wave offered to free farmers from the C market. There might be a farmer in Ethiopia who had, for twenty years, been subject to dollar-a-pound commodity pricing—a rate that kept him and his employees in poverty. But if that farmer managed to create an exceptional coffee, he or she might enter it into a regional or global competition, and if that coffee was highly rated, he or she could get the attention of a third-wave roaster, like Chicago’s Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea or Stumptown Coffee Roasters in Portland. And then something extraordinary could happen. They could trade directly.