Business
Ethiopia’s specialty coffee sector blossoms
The coffee sector is beginning to resemble the wine market, with buyers willing to pay a premium for crops that reflect local climates and harvesting techniques. Stumptown Coffee Roasters from Portland, Oregon is one of a growing number of specialty coffee traders beating a path to Ethiopia in search of the world’s best beans.
“The flavors that you find in the cup are flavors that you can’t find anywhere else in the world… Combinations of floral and different types of fruits… A really beautiful balance between liveliness and acidity. Good body. Good sweetness,” raves Adam McClellan, a green coffee buyer for the company. McClellan’s use of language more often associated with viticulture is not mere pretense.
With more than 1,200 identified chemical compounds in coffee, connoisseurs argue that the flavors and aromas of the very best coffee are equal to those of the finest wine. Cafe clientele around the world are enjoying the pleasures of a good cup of coffee and are willing to pay a premium for it. “For consumers to have something that tastes quite different with those floral aromatics and really sweet interesting flavors, it allows them to really see coffee as being something other than an everyday cheap commodity,” McClellan insists.
The term ‘specialty coffee’ was coined in 1978 and refers to beans grown in climates that have a distinct and superior taste. This is related to the wine-making concept of terroir, at the core of which is the assumption that the characteristics and qualities of individual wines are derived from local conditions.
Ethiopia, long considered the birthplace of Coffea arabica, is thought by many to have some of the best growing environments. “It’s essentially where everything began, so you have amazing evolutionary adaptation of the plant,” says Phil Robertson, the co-founder of the Calgary-based Phil & Sebastian Coffee Roasters. He went on to add, “The varietals have had so much time to adapt and that just gives them an incredible leg-up.”
High altitude beans
Gedeo Zone in southern Ethiopia is considered by some to be where the world’s best coffee is found. Types like Sidama and Yirgacheffe, made popular by coffee giant Starbucks, grow there. “The reason great coffee comes from here is because of its extremely high altitude,” Robertson explains, adding that the complex and dynamic flavors are due to the wide variation between day and night-time temperatures, which can double the length of maturation of the fruit.
But many traders say Ethiopian coffee has not yet reached its full potential in terms of quality and the volumes supplied to the specialty sector. It is estimated that just 1 percent of Ethiopia’s coffee exports are sold as specialty coffee. Robertson says he would like to see a 10-fold increase in the figure.
