We started early this morning, heading to the CoQua office to meet Moata, Ansha and the team. They’re doing really well – and laughed as they told me how they missed Russ (Founder of Reuben Hills). Ansha and Moata are both really busy and are set to expand CoQua, building on their repertoire of coffee buyers including us, 7Seeds and Coffee Collective.

On the way back, we stopped for a beautiful lunch of Injera – a traditional Ethiopian flatbread, that’s fermented with a slightly spongy, pancake-like texture, and served with tasty condiments. Then we went to another mill called Sufa, owned by Birhan, which was smaller but very clean and tidy. We’re the first buyers of Birhan’s coffee so the manager was incredibly excited to meet us and I knew they’d do a great job for us. We headed back from Sufa, excited to taste their coffees the next day.

We started the day with more cupping – trying some of the coffees we took from SNAP and Sufa mill. They were the freshest coffees I ever tasted in my life. Yirgacheffe from SNAP was unbelievably good. Chelbesa, Refisa and Raro also stood out, as did Birhan’s Gedeb.

After an exceptional morning of cupping, we went back to Sufa to meet the owner Birhan. Birhan invited us to lunch which was an amazing experience – more injera and a chat about his life and business in Ethiopia. After lunch, we went to Mecota mill, and took samples of beans to cup tomorrow. We headed back to the office at 6pm, checking the moisture, density and water activity of all the samples before calling it a night.

No surprise – we started with cupping. The beans from Mecota’s Mamud Gera GR1 also tasted really good. Unfortunately, one of the lot we took the day prior was baggy (a ‘baggy’ taste means the beans have been stored for too long, bringing out flavours of mildew) – it smelled even before cupping. Moata and Ansha agreed. I figured the washed coffees were left in storage too long, as the offer samples I cupped back at Reuben were great. So it was a bit of a mixed bag – some amazing lots of coffee, some that weren’t quite right. I spent the afternoon at Mecota mill, overseeing container loading and organising our shipment of coffee back to Australia.

Throughout the trip, I spoke with milling stations and exporters and they all re-iterated the importance of transparent trade. They said many exporters send samples to roasters that don’t match the eventual stock, so when roasteries buy up beans, the stock they get is different to the samples they first tried. This is one of the reasons we work so closely with CoQua, who pick up beans from the mills and assess their moisture/condition before sending them our way. They check stock on both the producer and roaster ends, so everyone enjoys fair and safe trade. Solidifying this relationship, and spending time with Moata and Ansha, were big highlights of my time in Ethiopia.

As a small business, we pride ourselves on supporting our coffee producers, ensuring a more sustainable income and lifestyle for their families and communities. We believe presenting the prices we pay for our coffee adds to an ongoing industry movement of transparency and accountability and in doing so, helps ensure the sustainability of the industry we love.