First Week

Ethiopia
In my first week I was fortunate enough to spend time with Mr Abdurahman Mahdi, who co owns the Kuru exporting coffee company with his brother. They prepare and export their coffee for Efico. I had been looking forward to this for quite some time, due to the thoroughly planned
agenda, and because the last washed Sidama samples cupped at Masteroast , were from Kuru. The night before I had been fortunate enough to enjoy his hospitality at a local Habesha (Ethiopian) cultural restaurant in Addis, it was a painless and tasty introduction into the local cuisine of injura (teff and water) and lots of slightly spicy side dishes.

The next day we visited the processing plant in Kuru, which is located on the southern road out of Addis. We discussed how nearly all the wet processing had finished in Ethiopia had been graded and was now waiting for sellers to release onto the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange. In
contrast natural coffees were still being processed; whilst in a few areas coffee cherries were still being picked and collected. The summary from Abdurahman in early January was the harvest was very good, and prices being demanded by farmers to buyers were high. In contrast the New York C price did not currently match the high domestic price expectations for this year’s crop, which had already been brought from the farmers. This predicament is something which became lot
clearer during my time in Ethiopia.

The processing facilities were organised and were prepping parchment coffee for export. Abdurahman stated the unit processed an average of 7,000 tonnes per year. I asked Abdurahman about the jute bag colour allocation for the green coffee waiting to be processed. He explained it
is ECX policy to distinguish coffee from regions, the Sidama region (green stamp) and the Oromia state (blue stamp). All the green coffee brought from the ECX held information from the respective ECX warehouses, such as the processing method, variety, allocated domestic grade and geographical region. For example the Sidama A USDB Q2, referred to unwashed speciality (grade 2) sidama, in this case from the geographical region of Abaya. I will explain this later on in a little more detail.

I went on to watch the processing of green coffee for international export. In cases such as this picture descriptions are best and may help digest with my commentary!