Keramo
ETHIOPIA
Our coffee’s producers live in the Sidama region, near Keramo, a remote, hard-to-reach village in the Bombe Mountains. The local smallholders are working with the producer and exporter, Daye Bensa Coffee, which in itself is a guarantee for high-quality cherry processing. The company, led by Asefa Dukamo, finished in the top 10 of the Cup of Excellence in 2020 with a natural lot similar to this one.
Ethiopia is the home of extraordinary coffees. Ethiopian coffee is instantly recognizable even in blind cuppings due to its distinctive flavour made up of several hundreds of indigenous arabica varietals grown wild in the various micro-climates of the country. 95% of Ethiopia’s 300 000 tonnes of coffee export is supplied by more than a million small, independent farmers. The rest is grown by an increasing number of private and state-owned plantations. Recently the Ethiopian government began reforming the export system to open the market and allow exporters and bigger farms (estates) to export their own coffee with one condition: the selling price must always be higher than that which would have been fixed by the ECX (Ethiopian Commodity Exchange) for a comparable quality of coffee. Several farms are currently in the process of applying for export licenses and have begun to detach themselves from the washing stations by processing and selling their own coffee.