Ethiopian Coffee - 1 Small Country's Remarkable Variety

Ethiopian coffee is best known for coffee’s origins. The highlands and fresh mountain streams create distinctive Arabica coffees, available at ROASTe. Yirgacheffe, Harrar and Sidamo can be delivered to you quickly so you can taste the most authentic of coffees.

Say Ethiopian coffee and coffee lovers are immediately transported back to the highlands with a sheepherder and his goats. Most of us have heard the legend about Kaldi, who, in about 850 CE was watching his goats among some bushes when they suddenly became much more exuberant and frisky. Upon close examination he discovered the red berries they’d been munching. So he chewed on a few and soon experienced new energetic feelings. After showing his wife, she told him to take them to the monks. Upon hearing how the mysterious beans affected behavior, they called them evil and threw them in the fire.

But of course, African coffee beans meeting fire produces an irresistible aroma. The monks raked them out of the fire and put them in water and enjoyed the resulting brew. And the rest is history. The Ethiopian coffee was taken to Arabian countries and from there transported all over the world to Europe and beyond. People in Ethiopia continued to revere the brew, so much so that they developed a ceremony around it. Today, Ethiopian coffee grows on the mountains from 2000 feet up to 6000 feet in elevation. In some regions one can still harvest beans from wild plants.

Of Ethiopian coffees, the most well-known are Harrar, Yirgacheffe and Sidamo. ROASTe carries an excellent selection of gourmet coffees from all three regions. Harrar is a rough medium-bodied bean with fruity, wine-like hints plus some wild notes and an exciting acidity. It is Yirgacheffe, called the granddaddy of coffee, which many consider to be possibly the world’s most remarkable coffee. Smooth and elegantly full-bodied, it is soft and rich, but its most striking characteristic is its extraordinary floral perfume. With Yirgacheffe, East African coffee’s intense fruitiness of winey-ness becomes evanescent and flower-like. It’s a wet-processed coffee. Sidama, a southern Ethiopian coffee, though also wet-processed, is less distinctive than Yirgacheffe, being lighter in body and exhibiting less intense fruitiness. It is in the mountains of Sidama where the wild coffee plants still flourish and are harvested by tribes people.

All three of these Ethiopian coffees benefit from the optimal coffee-growing conditions of this East African nation. The ample rainfall, rich volcanic soil and the high elevations all contribute to the delicious qualities of this special East African coffee. In addition, most growers use organic fertilizers to augment the already very fertile soil. Indeed, the majority of ROASTe’s Ethiopian coffees are organic in certification.