Sumatra, January 2012: 3
THURSDAY
The last day at Wahana started with a guided tour of the fields, having a closer look at the Andong Sari which is now in its 2nd year of producing. It’s a Javanese hybrid that have good yields there, but so far it looks like it bears a bit less fruit in the Sidikalang soil. It’s the only plot of Andong Sari in Sumatra so I’m curious to see if it’ll be on the cupping table tomorrow. They also took us to the 600 Costa Rican Caturra trees, who have yet to produce a significant crop after 4 years. I was quite excited to see 1250 Villa Sarchi trees as well, but these area also slow to produce, 4 years in and only a few cherries so far. If it cups well when it does mature, they will expand the lot, and they might prune the trees a bit next year as they’re looking a bit busy at the moment. The cherries I tasted were really sweet and quite fruity, so I’m excited to keep an eye on this one. All the different varietals here came from the Jember Research Centre in Java where the three Wahana agronomists have also received training. They’ve also been able to travel to Vietnam to learn about their coffee, and I hope at some point they’ll also be able to travel to Central America to see processing there.
Education is high on the priority list at Wahana, they are in fact building a coffee school there this year where growers can come to learn about shade trees, nurseries, planting, pruning, cupping etc. The building will hold bedrooms and kitchens for those who will travel from afar, a cupping lab and a lecture hall, and be within walking distance of the mill as well as the different varietal plots. It will be free for the farmers to attend and they will be bussed in from local ares first, then they will look into inviting farmers from further afield. The government have promised to assist in spreading the offer as far as possible, and Wahana hope to be able to teach 3 day courses for 50 people at least once per week. The training modules will be taught by the agronomists on site, and a couple of international companies are assisting in developing comprehensive contents. All this will of course cost money to build and run, and they’re welcoming any donation towards the $220.000 building at first, and then funds to keep the program going. One of the urgent subject to cover is the importance of planting shade trees, as since illegal logging has taken out a lot of the natural shade forest raising the temperatures, the pesky coffee borer beetles have been spreading very fast. While some help has been offered to distribute methanol/ethanol traps for the beetles, the root of the problem needs to be fixed and for a few years the government have driven campaigns to make the areas around Lake Toba green again, replanting the trees that were logged with no consideration for the environmental impact.
We head off to another farm where we later on get to see first hand another pest problem that Wahana hope to be able to find a solution for through their experiments and research. We meet with the farmer (he has 2 hectares himself) and collector Silalahi who gets cherry in from 7 groups of 30 farmers each, each of them with farms of about 10 hectares. He took us to the farm of Mr. Symbolan, who was in fine spirit in spite of his trees being affected by red stem borer, a larvae that eats its way from the ground up through the trunk of the tree, causing the stems and branches to wilt and/or break easily, and increases susceptibility to other pest and diseases. Young trees may die while older trees tend to survive, and there is no known chemical or biological cure at this time. Incidents tend to be less where there is good shade, and until preventative measures can be taken or a defense is found, infected trees should be taken up and burned.
This was the last farm we got to visit so we headed north back to Medan and said goodbye to our very brave and skilled driver Johnson and his assistant Ronnie, who were super sweet and had both put on the tshirts I gave them earlier in the week! Tomorrow we visit the Sarimakmur dry mill and do some cupping which I can’t wait for. I’m really looking forward to tasting all the coffee I’ve been snapping pics of for the last few days, and have high hopes for some tasty beans!
FRIDAY
Last day doing coffee in Medan, tomorrow I return home. Today the trip went to Sarimakmurs mill in Medan, where their coffee is finished for export. We’re greeted by the owners Mr Suryo Pranoto, his wife Maria Gorethy and son and manager Andry, who poured us a cup of coffee, fed us Chinese New Years cookies (it’s not till Monday but Maria likes to start the cookies early) and explained more about the story of Sarimakmur. Having dealt in spices, cocoa and sweetpotato for many years, they only began trading in coffee in 1994, currently exporting 14.000 tons of coffee per year. They started roasting as Opal Coffee 15 years ago, also importing some coffee from other producing countries to diversify their blends. They opened a cafe in Sydney in 2010 and just three months ago they started the Opal Cafe in Medan, in the building that used to be the family home. In the middle of all this came Wahana, after the local government contacted Suryo to see if he would be interested in taking on the land to produce coffee. Other than a little bit of maize and cabbage there wasn’t much there, so they brought in agronomists from Jember to analyze the soil and climate to establish whether the area would be well suited for coffee. After positive reports they began clearing the land, leaving/planting shade trees where needed, and bringing in varietals to experiment with.
The way they want to move growers away from delivering wet parchment to delivering cherry means that they have to spend a lot of time on the ground building relationships, and it limits them to focusing on one area at a time. Expansions are however in the pipeline, they already have one facility in Sulawesi and are currently planning a wet mill for cherry in Toraja. The quality of the Kalosi they saw last year as very disappointing and they wish to gain better control over the process there, as they have for example in Lintong and Sidikalang. The problems arose from bad weather conditions causing a very low yield, meaning the growers would pick even green cherry and somehow ferment it in order to make it soft enough for them to pulp- devestating the quality in the cup. Hendry our guide will be spending 9 months there this year to oversee developments, and I’m really looking forward to seeing what they will create, as the ‘regular’ Kalosi from them was quite nice 3-4 years ago. East-Timor, Flores and maybe even China might be next, these guys certainly are ambitious but seem to genuinely care about quality and moving the industry to a better place. They currently have about 10.000 employees across all sectors, about 1000 of them located at the HQ where we’re visiting.
After a long chat and exchanging of presents we went for a tour of the coffee warehouses, which were busy and in full production mode meaning we were able to have a good look at all the various stages. Except for the Wahana coffee, which is already density sorted in the Sidikalang mill, coffee starts off going through the density grader, continues on to the colour sorters (they can do 15 tons/hr) and through all the other various tubes and channels and sorters a dry mill contains. In a way many mills are all the same, but I really enjoyed the open, airy feel of this one, and the friendly vibe from the staff who were happy to chat and answer questions, and let me get very much in the way to take pictures. The ladies hand sorting had as much great fun watching and taking pictures of the pale, blonde visitor as I had taking pictures of them and trying my hand at sorting out the defects, the mood was really good and everyone was smiling and laughing, gossiping away over the tables. There were probably 6-700 women in that day by the conveyor belts and sorting tables, but in peak season there could be double that in a day over a couple of shifts. They get paid by the amount of defects they pick out of the green, 1 kg pays 500 rupiahs. Andry told me they start out with the greens from the mechanical sorters which only cleans the coffee up to about 25-30% defect, then depending on the grade they’re selling; single, double or triple-pick out anything down to zero defect which would be the requirement for roasters like us. Normally they do about 10-15 kg each in a day, but they could also do to up to 60 kg on a good day, perhaps if the coffees come in particularly rough looking!
After a brief chat with head roaster Ian and a mutual understanding that of course Probats are the best, we went up to the lab for a cupping of the various Wahana varieties, something I’d looked forward to all week! Having spent 4 years in a lab myself I was pleased to see a bunch of girls rocking the room, between Arina, Yuanita, Dani and Ani they had the space set up pretty sweet, two sample roasters, an espresso machine, samples galore, and two great comfy tables to cup on. They cup here daily checking preship, landed and processing samples, and we were about to try 10 fairly young samples of Wahanas last harvest from Nov/Dec. Dianto, another of Suryo and Marias children and agronomist at Wahana, answered my queries about a sample of peaberries I found on the counter (you may remember my wistful hoeps for more Indo PB’s in the previous post). He actually told be that he prefers drinking the peas himself over other grades, but as they only account for about 6% of production they’re not currently worth separating out for export- although I hope that one day will change. (hint hint if you read this Dianto!)
Equipped with cupping sheets we set about evaluating the coffees, and I thought I’d summarize briefly here what I found. I picked up a few samples to take back with me and I’ll make sure I get the rest sent over and hopefully I can put on a cupping of them all in London too, when they’re a bit more rested and I have more time to go in depth on the flavours.
The coffees:
Wahana Estate Washed: their ‘house blend’, super bright, crisp and clean, very nice ‘Indonesian’ character (which I think is important to preserve- all parts of the world shouldn’t taste the same!), herbal, cooled a bit rough but more due to young greens, not at all bad greens.
Wahana Estate Pulped: very pleasant texture, clean and sweet, fruity notes and long aftertaste, plums and cherries. Liked this a lot!
Wahana Estate Natural: watermelon, fruity as naturals are, quite a light texture, some indo character left underneath, might need a bit more rest of just a bit more cleaning to really shine, but great potential.
Rasuna: this was the one they’re rolling out all over Wahana so I hoped it would be good, and it was quite ok. A little uneven perhaps but some fruity characters, slightly savoury and nicely textured. Very decent coffee, but nothing wildly charming.
Jantung: probably my least favourite on the table an very much what many people unfortunately dismiss a lot of Indonesian coffee with: woody, rough and dry, some spicy notes but little sweetness and a lack of acidity. I was told this was a tricky one to roast and perhaps it could perform better under lighter circumstances, but I don’t feel the roast was noticeably too dark so my issues were with the bean itself.
Andong Sari: ah the Andong Sari, the coffee I bought last year from its first harvest and couldn’t work out how to roast to be a coffee I’d want to sell. Annoyingly, or thankfully, I really enjoyed this 2nd harvest sample, it was round and clean and had some soft stonefruit, spice and chocolate to it.
USDA: supposedly this is an Ethiopian line brought in by some Americans in the 50′s, but I found it to have little in common with Ethiopian coffee, perhaps a bit Harar-y if anything. A bit grainy, dry, with some tobacco and whisky, it was woody and while not directly unpleasant one of the only two on the table that I outright disliked.
Costa Rica: I quite like this cup, some confusion over the samples means I don’t know which of the Costa Rican varietals it was but I found it to be clean, crisp and a bit floral, very nice indeed.
Longberry: It didn’t blow my skirt up but everyone here raves about it, and I guess I can see that the boozy fruit and lush texture would be pleasing to many. I’d want to try this again in a couple of months on a slightly lighter roast perhaps, it just felt a bit closed off but I think it could grow on me.
Toraja: This felt like the standard Indonesian coffee I’d expect, just cleaner! A bit generic perhaps but very inoffensive, full bodied and a bit spicy. Just ok.
So in conclusion, I was really pleased to find a lot of the coffees to be much better than most things I’ve had from Indonesia, and to be very varied as I’d hope and expect. Will I try to buy any of these, like the Andong Sari, again? I’d love to but I don’t know. I would perhaps wait till grainpro or vacpacks become available as shipping options, as I think with Indo coffees, which I generally find to drop off very early after harvest, it’d give me the added confidence that nothing gets tainted or ruined in transit and storage or changed by too rapid water movements in the green. I’d also love to not have coffees machine dried, but weather and facility conditions here might not be suited for a lot of raised bed and patio. I hear Aceh has some raised beds tho, which is interesting.
Leaving the mill we headed over to the newly opened Opal Cafe, and were greeted by manager Michael who made sure we were very well looked after by the lovely crew. I had to try the Wahana Wayag, a varietal I hadn’t heard mentioned till today- turns out there is so little of it they’ve decided to make it an Opal Cafe exclusive. Which is annoying, cause I was told it was an Ethiopian strain and the pourover I had Alfian make me, even if it was of the espresso roast and quite roasty with it, I could still tell it was yummy underneath! Perhaps if I twist someone’s arm I can get a sample across to try on a lighter roast…
I also had the pleasure of chatting to Resi from the Indonesian Specialty Coffee Association, a young group that are working to raise awareness and the profile of Indonesian coffee both to their internal market and internationally. Having exhibited at the SCAA show for the last 5 years they will this year do their first show in Vienna, so I look forward to seeing her again there and to hopefully share with her any Sumatran or other Indonesian coffee I may have bought by then!
So now I’m headed home full of impressions and a few fewer questions, and a greater understanding of the challenges and opportunities for Indonesian coffee. Terima kashi to Hendry and Finn especially, growers, millers, hosts, fellow travellers, guides, drivers and animals big and small- it’s been a trip!
Sumatra, January 2012: 2
WEDNESDAY
After a few hours of sleep at Wahana (jetlag and barking St Bernards are not a good combo!) we set off to visit more farms, heading north to Merek. A trip that should have taken an hour took two as we were low on gas and had to go through three gas stations before we found one with fuel on offer. But eventually we pulled up on a bumpy country lane and met Mr. Ginting, a farmer and collector who gathers cherry from 50 local growers as well as his own half hectare plot where he’s growing a mix of mature and young trees. He sells to Wahana who sends trucks to collect the cherry, ensuring that the time from harvest to processing is kept to a minimum. The plot we’re visiting belongs to one of his suppliers and is a 0.5 hectare plot growing 7 year old Ateng. The owner doesn’t tend to prune these as the yield is higher at the top of the trees, so they’ve grown to their full 2 meters and they use ladders to pick from the top. Here also, the yield has been low in the last couple of years but this coming harvest is looking up.
I asked how the transition from selling the mills cherry instead of parchment has been for them, and Ginting explained that while selling parchment at the moment would have been financially more beneficial to him, the general feeling is that selling cherry is less work than pulping themselves so the difference in price is outweighed by convenience. He currently pays the growers 8700 rupiah per kg, and sells it to Wahana for 8900, clearing 200 for his commission. This February he’s projecting to move about 7000 kg cherry per week from his 50 farmers. All of them are of course free to sell to one of the three other local collectors, just as Ginting is free to see to other mills than Wahana, but he has built up a loyalty with his suppliers and buyers that means he carries on with the new cherry procedures. One of the ways he secures supply is by pre financing the cherry, offering loans in advance against promise of supply. Quality wise there is no premium for riper cherries, but Wahana will accept under ripe lots only up to a certain sensible level so they know if they pick too many greens they might not be picked up. The growers generally avoid picking greens anyway, as they weigh less than ripe cherries and when picking greens the stem and future flower bud usually comes off the branch, destroying the next fruiting.
When asked if there would ever be a possibility to buy coffee just from this small group of producers, the answer was no, volumes not being high enough to warrant the extra work- but I hope that in time this attitude will change and that they put logistics in place to at least experiment with this.
Leaving the farm we drove to the sleepy fishing village of Tongging for lunch, and it turned out that we had to catch it ourselves so Alex and I clambered onto one of the floating fish pens where lunch was swimming around, net in hand. We caught about 8 big fishies to feed the crew, and I made sure to save half a fish for the hungry cats waiting to peruse out leftovers. Lunch was had in a little wooden lookout pavilion by the water, to the sound of carpenters putting a new roof on the restaurant- the old one blew off in a recent storm and was strewn in pieces on the other side of the road. The landscape climbing up and down from this little village was some of the nicest I’ve seen so far, I couldn’t get any pictures to do it justice but I promise you it was well nice!
Next up was a stop in at Mr Bayu’s farm in Simalungun, another grower and collector who gathers cherries for Wahana from 160 other producers. His own plot is 8 hectares and was started 4 years ago when his son Bau Jr was born. The 160 other farms range from 1-4 hectares, so this is quite a nice sized operator having started as a collector in 2009. We were a bit unsure about the varietal he is growing, he called it Caturra but it didn’t look like it to us, one suggestion was that is could be Sigarar-Utang, the ‘debt payer’. A high yielding plant, his crops have nonetheless been down by about 30 % the last two years, the last time he felt he had a 100% crop was 2010 when he did 10 tons of cherry per day from his 160 suppliers, over a 90 days harvest period. This year he hopes to be up by 5% again, to about 670 tons of cherry. He recently cut the undergrowth around his trees as part of routine maintenance work, and the trees looked full and healthy, not shade covered but not looking like they were too adversely affected by this. He showed us how the cherries mature starting from the tip of the branch ripening first, then the middle of the branch (where the mid harvest and best cherries sit-also where he chooses mother seeds from) to the cherries closest to the trunk where light is lower and ripening is slower.
Sumatra, January 2012: 1
SATURDAY
Medan is hot and humid, not my favourite type of weather but if you’re into it I guess it’s nice to get a free steam bath every time you walk outside! I haven’t done as much research into Indonesian coffees as I would have liked to before coming out here, so opting for the hotel aircon and internet access while it’s available seems the ideal option. We’re heading to the Wahana Estate in Sidikalang west of Lake Toba, but taking the route east of the lake on the way south from Medan, stopping in Parapat and Lintong Nihuta on the way around. It’ll be a couple of days of travel before I get to any coffee and almost a week to cup anything, so for now I’m just looking forward to getting out of the city and start climbing into cooler altitudes, seeing what the landscape has to offer on the way. Sumatra is an incredibly green and fertile place, the plants, trees and wildlife here are unique, but it’s also lost about half of its tropical rainforest since the 80’s and many animal species are endangered. Only around 922 of the 17-18.000 islands that form Indonesia are inhabited, with 45-50 million people (about 21-22% of the total population) living on Sumatra which is the largest fully Indonesian island of them all. Coffee wise Indonesia is roughly the 4th largest coffee producer in the world with about 7 million bags per year, but only 15-18% of the coffee is Arabica. More than 90% of the coffee is produced by smallholders with plots averaging 1-2 hectare, and are often just a part of the crops produced on a farmers land. As with any producing country you can of course get great, clean and fresh coffees out of here, but it’s not entirely unwarranted that Indonesian coffees don’t have the best reputation in the specialty sector. You have to know where to look and be patient in your search for the best lots, accept that traceability is not easy to define and be willing to pay a lot for the best selections. I’m curious as to what I’ll see here, as I’m visiting a farm that I tentatively bought just two bags from last year, but upon roasting them I never found a way to get them suited for release and so they never made it onto the offer list.
SUNDAY
The road out of Medan was bursting with colour and life today, the city gearing up for Chinese New Years and being the weekend it seems there were weddings being celebrated on every block. Lovely billboards spelling out the happy couples’ names in flowers were positioned on the sidewalks announcing the grand occasion, and people walking to and fro were sporting their Sunday best. Roadside food stalls selling every type of snack and treat you could wish for, and tuk tuks ferrying passengers, goods and food down the streets, weaving in and out of the chaotic traffic with considerable skill. Motorcycles seems to be the transport of choice for a cross section of people; lone riders, young couples as well as entire families with small kids all scooting along the loosely defined ‘lanes’ with impressively confident and casual maneuvers.
The Sunday pace slowed down as we reached the edges of town, and entered the flat, lush land towards Pancurbatu. Endless irrigated fields stretched for miles, neatly dug out into square plots of differing crops, people stood to their knees in water harvesting, replanting and repairing mudbanks. Geese and chicken traipsed around on the intermittent squares set aside for homes and front yards, people picking fruits and berries for their breakfast. After a couple of hours it felt like we started to climb a bit, the water soaked plains giving way to little rivers and waterfalls where children swam while their mothers did the laundry. Around Saribudolok fields of farmed palm trees started unfolding on either side of the road, an abandoned train track just visible past the neat rows. All along the way, beautifully built and adorned family grave sites stood as small monuments to lost loved ones, often built as mini traditional batak style houses with paintings of the deceased on the front. The fields of palm trees gave way to endless stretches of rubber trees, the bark stripped off in sections and a plug draining the latex into a little collection cup tied to the trunk. 4 hours into the drive and we climbed still higher, the road starting to wind and the vegetation changing to taller, slimmer trees whose leaves shone like glitter as they tumbled to the ground in the sun. Passing through a protected habitat for monkeys and being watched by them perched by the roadside, we finally caught the first glimpses of Lake Toba and started the small descent into Parapat on the Uluan penninsula where we’re staying the night.
In town we had the opportunity to go for a small wander, stumbling across parchment and green coffee drying in front yards and on sidewalks, even on the docks in the small Parapat harbour. From this village you can take the ferry to Samosir Island in the middle of the lake, both formed after a supervolcano erupted 75000 years ago. There used to be a narrow strip of land connecting the island to the side of the caldera, but they dug a canal through it so boats could freely circle Samosir. With only a bridge connecting Panguruan on the island with Tele on the main land, Samosir is now the largest island within an island in the world. Some coffee grows there and I’d love to one day be able to taste Samosir beans on their own, hopefully the industry will move towards lot separation down to such specifics, it’s be a better selling point than Kopi Luwak for sure.
MONDAY
Today we drove from Parapat on the east side of Lake Toba to Lintong on the south side, stopping in at the Sarimakmur dry mill that was built here a year ago. Driving up from the lake I finally got the first Sumatran coffee tree sightings, with several garden coffee plots planted right up to the sides of peoples homes, many front yards housing small nurseries of healthy looking seedlings. Hitting another long stretch of flat plains, more traditional Batak houses could be seen spread out in the water soaked fields where people tended their crops while their oxen grazed and tried not to get stuck in the mud. Again the road got steeper and we began another slow climb, until we started seeing coffee again and arrived at the Lintong Nihuta mill. Most people when thinking of Sumatran coffee will know the words Lintong and Mandheling but Lintong is the only one that actually bears some specific relation to a growing area. I believe it was just due to a misunderstanding with early traders, but Mandheling is loosely and named after the Mandailing people who grow a small amount of coffee in the Mandailing and Tapanuli regencies south of Lintong and Lake Toba, but is often given as a name to coffee from all over Northern Sumatra.
This mill receives wet parchment from the local growers, who pulp on their own farms using basic hand cranked pulping machines called luwaks. Instead of drying immediately they’ll usually keep the parchment in bags for a day or so until delivering it to the mill, and I was told they’re currently receiving IDR 29.000-30.000 per bambu (approx 1kg)- the cup used to measure volume of coffee delivered. It seems very high to me when I look at the numbers of other transactions, but perhaps something got lost in translation. The GBP equivalent is currently about £2.05-£2.10 This is quite an increase from 5 years ago when they might have received about IDR 13-15.000 (£0.92-£1.05) per kg of wet parchment. However, no differentiation is made for delivering more or less ripe or well picked coffee. When we arrived there were sacks of wet parchment sat on the warehouse floor that had been picked yesterday and delivered this morning. This coffee was to be processed by the traditional Giling Basah (wet grinding) method, which is quite unique for Indonesia and responsible for the coffees deep blue-green colour and particular taste profile. Giling Basah is also referred to as semi-washed, wet hulled or local process, and compared to other producing countries, the bulk of the drying period is spent without the parchment on the green. The chain goes a bit like this; farmers pulp on their farms and deliver the wet parchment to the mills the next day, the coffee is then spread out onto patios to dry for a day. Once down to about 30-40% moisture and still very soft (you see a lot of goat hooves in the coffee when the soft wet greens are squished in the huller), the coffee is milled to remove the parchment, and becomes what’s referred to as ‘labu’- green but wet. The green coffee then goes back on patios to dry down to ‘asalan’, nearly dry at 16-18% but still unsorted, till finally it reaches 12% moisture and can be sent to the dry mill in Medan for final sorting, removal of foreign matter and grading. 3-400 tons of green comes out of this Lintong mill in a season.
I think before moving on I’m going to clarify a bit the various stages that coffee is traded at and how they relate to eachother, as talking about prices per kg when there are 4 different kg’s in opertaion can get a bit confusing. The numbers you’ll have to give and take a bit on, but roughly: 1 kg of cherry = 0.4kg wet parchment = 0.21 kg dry parchment = 0.18kg green, and 5kg cherry= 2kg wet parchment = 1 kg dry parchment = 0.9 kg green. I think. I’m going to confuse myself several times over this on this trip I’m sure!
The weather has been a bit unstable recently with light showers spread out during the day, which gave us a chance to see and smell first hand some of the particular challenges around processing coffee in Sumatra. If the weather doesn’t get sunnier, the bagged up parchment in the warehouse that arrived this morning will perhaps not be going onto the patios to dry for days yet. I stuck my hand into the bags and the coffee was already really hot and smelling of boozy fruit, essentially fermenting away and cooking in it’s own heat. I was told the coffee would stay in the bags for a maximum of three days, but there was no explanation for what would happen if it rained for weeks. Even after one day I thought the coffee must surely already be adversely affected by the wait. I remembered passing through a local village market seeing women sat on top of huge tarp bags of parchment with bambus, ready to sell to collectors, and I shudder to think of the chemistry going on inside that mass of coffee. Some finished green Rasuna in bags nearby smelled and looked ok, so perhaps the parchment offers some protection against the fermentation, I don’t know. On the patios some labu was spread out to dry, and as it started drizzling while we were there they quickly covered the greens with tarps- however I don’t think there was anything protecting the coffee from getting wet as rainwater soaked the patios and surely must have seeped in underneath. Blacks the dog kept me company as we peered out of the warehouse doors onto the wet patios. I’d love to see some polytunneled drying beds here in the future.
Moving on we headed to visit one of the local growers, Mrs Sihombing who has 3 hectares of Rasuna and Aceh varieties growing on her land. We walked around a plot of healthy looking trees while a couple of ladies picked the a few ripe cherries off the branches, being between the main (Oct-Nov) and fly (Mar-May) crop there wasn’t much cherry to see but a few flower buds and green cherries heralded the harvests to come. We had a demonstration of her luwak in action and the way she dries some parchment on tarps in her field, bundling them up for the rain. We also got to walk around her vegetable patch and pig pens accompanied by her little son Toto, who took little convincing to get stuck into my trusty kid ice-breaking balloons.
After a quick lunch break at a Lake Toba lookout point we finally made out way to the lovely Wahana Grana Makmur Estate in Sidikalang, an impressive farm and facility built by exporters PT Sari Makmur Tunggal Mandiri. They are a huge exporter with mills in Lintong, Medan, Surabaya and Lampung as well as the facilities in Takengon and Sidikalang. They represent a fair chunk of all Indonesian coffee exports, and have built Wahana as an experimental farm where varietals will be planted, growers educated and visitors hosted in order to move the industry forward.
We’re spending three nights here and I’m already making friends with the Wahana inhabitants. There are about 10 big, bouncing, slobbering St Bernard dogs and puppies romping around in a kennel by the main house, super excited to get fussings and almost getting their heads stuck in the fence trying to get closer to the lady feeding them toast she brought from the hotel in Parapat. Around the back of the staff quarters a pen full of rabbits hop up to the fence as I approach, and have a go at eating my skirt and shoes while I pick up one of the babies to get a cuddle in. Two small luwaks live in cages on the terrace, they look to be healthy and calm and I’m told they’re kept as pets and when awake at night can be picked up and held, but I don’t get the chance to for now. Going for a quick walk before it got too dark to see anything, it seems a very well organized place, trees look bushy and healthy and the ground is soft and spungy, shade trees tower over all the fields and the vegetable and fruit gardens are full of interesting, delicious looking produce.
TUESDAY
Cornel, one of the Wahana agronomist on site gave us a tour of the nursery, showing the stages of the plant from soldier to seedling and ready-for-the-field plants. They choose the best cherries they can get off the healthiest most productive trees, pulp them and wash the mucilage off the parchment, then sow them into neat rows under shade cover. After 3 months they germinate and at 7 months and 8-9 set of leaves they get planted into their permanent plots. They have about an 80% germination rate on the Rasuna plants they’re currently rolling out, but also have another 11 varietals planted across various experimental plots. For example they’ve brought the high yielding Jantung Aceh down from the north to see how it does here in Sidikalang, and if it’s successful they will roll it out to local growers as well. They’re also working on Longberry from Ethiopia to see how that fares, and have other plots of Andong Sari, Villa Sarchi, Toraja, Indian S795/Jember, Hibrido de Timor/Tim Tim, Caturra, Catuai, USDA and Tipica. They are currently focusing on planting new Rasuna, Toraja and Longberry, those being the three that are showing the best results taste wise. This year they are adding 20 hectares of Rasuna to the existing 190 hectares across 7 plots that they already have. The trees we’re seeing are only 1-5 years old, and have a lifespan of 25 years before the yield gets too low to be viable.
I’m not an expert on coffee growing what so ever and these trees are all planted in the last 5 years, but I was wondering if with all the shade trees on Wahana if the varieties of coffee that had very dense growth would struggle to get enough sun to produce well, and a lengthy discussion on pruning ensued. The custom here is to prune only from the top to keep picking hight at a sensible level, but with some of the compact varietals I’m thinking a bit of pruning throughout would be beneficial too. There seems to be little flowers and green cherry going on, and even in young trees I’d expect a little more this time of year. It’ll be interesting to see how it develops in the next 10 years, when I asked if they’d ever stump trees here it seemed a foreign concept- I think you prune from the top and replace the tree when it stops yielding well and that’s it. Hopefully Wahana will be the perfect place to experiment a bit!
Walking from the nursery up to the mill we passed workers cutting the undergrowth around the trees, something they do here twice per year to keep the nutrients going to the coffee roots, increase air circulation and water uptake, and providing natural compost. This mill differs from the one in Lintong by the fact that it receives cherry and not wet parchment, providing some increased control over the process and final result. It’s a novel approach and it took some convincing to get the local growers to part with cherry instead of pulping it themselves, and I still have to work on the maths a bit to find out if the prices they get paid for the two products compare. We were greeted by manager Frenmin, who took us through the process starting with cherries being dumped into a well in the floor and transported up to the first sorting machine. The cherries they were working on today were picked yesterday and brought in this morning, and are destined for local consumption. During peak harvest they have the growers pick in the mornings, truck the cherry in in the evening and pulp through the night. At the moment the farmers get paid 8-9000 rupiah per kg of cherry, compared to 4000 only two years ago. This has to do with the yield being low in the last few years, pushing prices up. Frenmin told me that they can move anything from 40-80 tons of cherry through here in a harvest season, and that of the 15% green coffee that leaves him with, only 8-10% will be of export quality.
The first stage for the cherry entering the processing machines at this mill is the pre-rinse that sorts out the sticks, stones, leaves and other foreign objects. The second stage is the wash and float, where the good, heavy cherries continue on while the bad, floating and green cherry gets channeled into a separate tank for internal consumption. The good cherry then gets pulped and gets floated again, sinking parchment on to the fermentation tanks and the floaters off for local drinking. Another channel separates the pulp and sends it off to composting, while any unpulped cherries; those that were too small for the machines and typically the peaberries, also head off destined for local consumption. (I’d quite like to see more peaberry from Indonesia, btw. It’s a shame they rarely see the value of it, but I was quite fond of our Toarco PB last year) The good parchment that made the grade is kept in fermentation tanks for 12 hours if it’s going to be semi-washed, and 16-18 hours if it’s going to be washed- weather dependent. I asked if they’d ever tried preparing pulped naturals, not fermenting but placing the mucilage covered seeds onto patios until 12% dry, but Frenmin had done this experiment and found the coffee to dry badly and ferment, so no luck on that. I hope at some point they’ll re-visit the idea with new techniques and equipment, but one project at a time I suppose! The fact that they do fully washeds here and not just Giling Basah is quite exciting in itself.
Still, whether semi or fully dried, it’s not quite what I know from other countries, semi dry only goes on the patio for a day before being hulled and returned outside to dry, while the washed dries on patios for a day, gets hulled, and then finished off in large mechanical driers. These tumble the cofee around in 35C heat, 12 hours a day for about a week, then the coffee is bagged up and sent to Medan for final grading. The driers hold about 15000 litres each, or 24 tons parchment/10-12 tons cherry. They do in fact also produce full naturals here by mechanical drying, same process as for the washed but spending up to 10 days in the drier before it reaches export levels of humidity. Mechanically dried naturals look quite different from sun dried naturals, and I hope I get to cup some later on in the week!
I asked if there was a local cascara or hoja, but it seems all pulp and husk gets composted or used as fuel. Since logging for fuel is illegal they have to burn the waste as well as buy in candlenut shells and palm kernel shells to heat the water that acts like radiator heating for the driers.
Finishing up our tour we continued on to visit another, smaller farm that has it’s own mill on site, processing for itself and neighbouring growers. We were greeted by Mr. Saragi who took us through some huge robusta trees that frames his coffee plot of 4 year old Ateng trees, where I found his rather wonderful mother Mrs Juliana Tarigen picking cherries and peering at us with curious eyes. I have to admit to my surprise she spoke English really well, having gone to school in Medan as a young girl and studied Dutch and English there. In spite of not having spoken the language for 60 years, we chatted away about her coffee, the chilies she was planting between the rows, her 8 (!) kids and the history of the farm. She bought it with her husband in the 60’s, ripped out all the old trees that were there and planted new stock, and 4 years ago her son added the mill to the farm, creating another income stream. She invited us into her home for coffee, and while it was being prepared we wandered over to the patios and mill to have a look. Farm hands were busy raking labu out on the concrete, while dogs were sunning themselves on the warm coffee. In the warehouse we could see the 150 million rupiah processing machine that Mr Saragi had invested in, allowing him to mill 500 tons of green coffee per year from his own and neighbours’ crops. Upon selling the green to the exporters he said making IDR 6000 per kg greens – which seems to me to be quite low so perhaps something got lost in translation again, but he’s very happy with his investment and they just build a brand new, beautiful house where we then went to have coffee in. Sitting around on mats, watching Juliana prepare her chewing tobacco while sipping the hot, sweet, truly home made coffee, I kinda had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. This tiny little old lady with the cheeky smile and sparkly eyes was just too magical and sometimes unexpected people and my job are just the best in the world.
Last Kenya of the Year: Kiandu AA
Just to let you know that we’re down to the last Kenyan lot of this crop – the Kiandu AA
This is a seriously delicious coffee, still vibrant and full of pink grapefruit, crisp apple and berry notes.
January Yard Sale!
Over the years, we’ve accumulated a great deal of ‘stuff’ here at Square Mile, and with our recent move we had a chance to sort through some of the boxes and cupboards that were bursting with all sorts of coffee related nicknacks. As we hate throwing anything away, we’ve concluded that we need to have a yard sale!
With barista competition season looming, this might be a good chance to find some new equipment, in addition to a miscellany of cups, brewers, tools or spare parts that you might have a use for at home or at work. Our regular stock of brewers, t-shirts, coffee and calendars will of course also be available for purchase!
Bargains will be had, and we’re going cash only!
Beer will be provided by the Redchurch Brewery and a few snacks and music to shop courtesy of Flick and Bill of Taste of Bitter Love fame!
Sale starts at 1pm on Sunday January 8th, at 8 Pritchards Road E2 9AP (Entry from Emma street) See you there!
Holiday opening hours
Team Square Mile are very much looking forward to the festive season, and we want to make sure everyone who are planning to enjoy our coffee during their holidays are fully up to date on our shipping deadlines!
Bearing in mind the potential for seasonal delays with both Royal Mail and FedEx that are outside of our control, we hope you’ll place your orders in good time in order to avoid disappointment!
The last December day of roasting and shipping webshop orders with Royal Mail will be Thursday the 22nd, and the first day we’ll roast and ship webshop orders in the new year will be Thursday January 5th.
For those who get deliveries by FedEx, the last day they will collect from us will be Friday the 23rd. While they will be doing deliveries on Saturday the 24t, if you know that you need a Saturday delivery, please specify this when placing your order. They might otherwise hold your delivery till between Dec 28th and 31st. The first day in the new year that they will collect from us will be Tuesday January 3rd.
Our offices will be closed from and with Dec 24th till and with Jan 2nd, if you need any assistance in this time period please drop us an email!
Happy holidays!
Ethiopia, November 2011: 5
(Hey guys! Last post from Ethiopia, please allow a bit of wiggle room on some of the numbers here and in the previous days, info flies around very fast and I think some guesswork and over-estimation is definitely involved, but I’m recounting things as best I can under the circumstances.)
WEDNESDAY
I was woken up at 2 am this morning by thundering rains, so I was a bit worried that the trips scheduled for today were going to be a wash out, literally. But the roads seem to have held up ok, so stop number one was the co-op of Bele Kara, first of three Yirga Cheffe Union co-ops on the program. A smaller co-op with about 800 members, they had some parchment on their drying beds already, but quite wet still so very recently out of the soaking tank. There had been some confusion as to the timing of our visit and we could tell they were stressed by not really being prepared for us, so we thought it best to move on to the next place.
Addis Katema at 1900 masl has just seen their membership almost double, from 474 growers last year to 906 this year. Industrial manager Tsegaye Gelicha told us that they (also) were projecting for 1 million kgs of cherry this year, up from 191 000 kgs last year. Such expansion seems like unfeasible task in a short amount of time, and while 150 beds are on site already, they’re having some challenges with raising money to build the drying beds they need to accommodate the growth. Thankfully the mill should be able to cope as a demucilager was installed a few years ago, able to churn through 1500 kg of cherry per hour. Since they started buying 14 days ago they’ve done 9415 kgs at 15 birr/kg.
The third and last stop of the day was the Koke co-op, with 1075 members currently projected to deliver their pickings. Last year they did 365 522 kgs of cherry, and (like all of them it seems) are planning to do 1 million this season. They have 76 drying beds but have bought materials to build 120 more, a big investment taking out of the pot for buying cherry. To cover what they’ll need to spend this year, a loan application of 9 mill birr was submitted. But it only come back with 3 mill granted, so the rest will have to be raised through pre-finance from the union and buyers.
Last year they only did washed coffee here, but this year they’re thinking to do 50/50 with naturals. The season only a week into buying, they’ve managed 13 000 kg (also at 15 birr/kg) so far but will at peak times be able to process 25 000 kg cherry per day. It will be interesting to see how they manage to go from all washed to 50/50, and whether their (and the others) projected 1 million kilos cherry will really be that much. A lot of these co-ops already do a great job but hey all have potential to to better, and as we’re collecting some samples off drying beds wherever we can, Saturday’s cupping should be an interesting preview of what we can expect from the 2011/12 harvest.
I’m now tucked up in my cosy Aregash lodge hut, having just been treated to great food and a coffee ceremony by the staff. The girl roasting and brewing for us looked lovely in her traditional dress, but I was slightly distracted by the groundskeeper feeding our dinner leftovers to the patiently waiting vultures and hyenas in the background. We stopped by here for lunch and dinner last week and were really well looked after by Rauda one of the waitresses, who is 7 months pregnant with little boy. Thankfully she remembered me and didn’t think I was just some crazy lady when I turned up in the kitchen with a baby blanket I’d got for her! There’s some faint howling in the distance outside, but I’m hoping the hyenas had enough with what they were fed and aren’t going to be lurking should I decide to poke my head out the door. I might just call it an early night, I think….
THURSDAY
No hyena bite marks, brilliant! Nice big spiders in the shower tho, always a treat.
Since today was the last day of the co-op and farm visits, we set off nice and early to go see the first on the program, just outside Aleta Wondo town an hours drive from Yirga Alem. This co-op with its 2400 members is part of the Sidamo Union, and while everything was not perfect during our visit it was a good learning experience in some of the challenges the Ethiopian coffee industry is facing.
This washing station has both an aggregate and a demucilager that was donated to them a few years ago, but the aggregate hasn’t produced stable enough electricity so far to really power the demucilager. We were told this was being sorted soon, but in the meantime the old pulper is still the only machine in use, running on diesel but sadly also leaking quite a bit of diesel onto the ground. In the last month they’ve done 83 000 kg cherry through the pulper, but only one day’s worth of 4000 kg in the demucilager to see if it’s still working. It was doing ok in the test, but they really felt they needed more help and training in the correct use of it, as they had three days on install but nothing since. The install itself had us scratching our heads for a while, as post the sorting and pulping section of the machine, the setup looked as if the parchment was going into a selection of 6 fermentation tanks, before being funneled through to the demucilager, and then into another two soaking tanks. We couldn’t quite work out the tank-stage between pulper and demucilager, as they’d normally be installed straight after each other. The only explanation I could think of was that they had decided there was no room on the floor in the machine room for them to function as a continuous unit, and that the tanks in between them were not used for actual soaking or fermentation but just as channels on the way through to the final two tanks. This would of course be ok if not really optimal, as the increase in capacity that the machine gives would be negated by the fact that only two soaking tanks were really useable. I think in the end after much discussion with Tamire the operations manager we clarified that the lack of space was in fact the reason for the strange setup, and that the people contracted by the union had not installed in the best way. However I think with minor adjustments the demucilager could in fact be moved up to the machine room floor, so it’ll be interesting to see if they can make the setup work more fluently, maximizing the use of tanks they have available.
The three villages and 2400 co-op members surrounding this mill delivered 200 000 kg cherry last year, but this harvest they said they were projecting 2 million kg cherry, a staggering rise I thought, if indeed correct. Paying 13.5 birr per kg, a price that has been stable since they opened a month ago, this was also one of the lowest price we’ve seen so far. On the drying beds, parchment was piled high and not spread out very evenly, resulting in a lot of cracked parchment and layers of dry on top of wet. Having seen the challenges facing this mill it certainly showed that a lot of work still have to be done in order to ensure clean, well processed coffee from all stations in Ethiopia.
The next stop of the day was also a bit of a disappointment, as we went to see one site out of four belonging to another large co-op. One of the machine rooms had a pulper in it, and another machine room was empty but looking as if it was being planned for another pulper. Only 15 days into the season there was a tiny bit of coffee on the beds, and at 13 birr/kg this was the lowest price we’ve seen so far. A bit frustrated at not being able to access one of the other, busier sites due to terrible road conditions, we decided to turn back to Aregash for some lunch and to review how we wanted to spend the rest of the day. The conclusion was to first spend some time on the phone to find a nearby co-op that was actually processing that evening, and wait till just before dark to visit. In the meantime Admasu one of the Aregash staff took us on a hike around the land, checking out the little coffee plantation and nursery they have set up for their guests and staff, the kitchen gardens and woodlands where their fruit and vegetables come from, and the hyena caves, dug out of the hillsides as hiding places for the royal family during the war with the Italians. Monkeys followed us through the trees as we walked through the occasionally dense forest, shaking leaves and sticks down onto our heads, I’m fairly sure they did it on purpose too.
When finally time to hit Fero the last co-op of the trip, we had some sad news that meant driving in the dark on bumpy country lanes was done even more slowly than normal. Two young men on a motorcycle had died in a collision with a tourist bus just hours earlier, and along the road the faces of the locals, normally smiling and curious, were set in stone watching with hesitation as we drove past.
At Fero the mood was a little brighter but quite hectic, as this large co-op of 3674 members were taking deliveries, pulping and filling fermentation tanks in full tempo. Last year they did 870 477 kg cherry but are aiming for 1.5 million this year, so no time to lose, really! Well organized, clean and efficient this was a good way to end the day and the site visits on this trip, and conversation at dinner and around the campfire tonight has been filled with anticipation of how the samples from these places will cup in a couple of months. Only time will tell but I’m certainly excited to start buying fresh crop Ethiopian again soon!
FRIDAY
Most of today was spent driving back to Addis, with only a couple of little detours along the way, more or less related to coffee. In Shashamene we stopped off for a brief visit to the Rastafarian HQ, where for a small fee of 50 birr per person we were able to have a look round and a chat with Peter the head of the community. While signs were clearly up saying no photos allowed, as long as we were respectful we were granted permission to take a few pictures, and Peter was also quite happy to have polaroids done of himself and a few of the group who gathered around. Daniel, a young man from Trinidad who has traveled here to live in the compound and study the ways of the rastas, kindly posed for me at the gates with the 12 colours, giving the sign of the trinity. A friendly bunch, we were sent off with some words of wisdom on reading our bible, a chapter a day, and to believe.
Closer to Addis we swung by the processing plant of the Oromia Union, a massive warehouse with an impressive set up, and another warehouse in construction just across the yard. Tadesse Meskela, the president of the Union gave us a tour of the space, currently just clearing out the last of the current crop lots and preparing the machinery for the new crop coffees coming in a month’s time. When busy season hits, they’ll be working day and night for 8 months, 3 shifts of 300 women each sat by the sorting belts to hand pick the already thoroughly machine-sorted greens. For the premium grade lots the automated belts will be set for a smaller pause in front of the ladies for them to control, for the lower grades they will have more time per section to pick out any dodgy beans.
Now back at the hotel in Addis, I’ve completed the part of this trip that hopefully will help me identify the potential in some farms and co-ops that we’d like to watch closer as the harvest really gets underway. There is so much potential for some great lots this year, in spite of some of the problems and obstacles that clearly take a long time to fix.
SATURDAY
Today I slept in! Woohoo! And then I went to cup some of the samples that have been collected at the farms and co-ops visited so far, as well as comparing a couple of them to remaining samples of the finishing current crop. As expected the new crop samples were a bit young and early, some of them not even dried thoroughly enough to give a representative cup of where they are at with the early pickings. I expect samples from peak season at all these farms/co-ops to be much better, but nevertheless it was interesting to try.
I fly back to London in a couple of hours, it’s been a crazy, frustrating, fun and educational two weeks- but I think I’d need two months if not two years to really feel I have a hold on this complicated, confusing, ever changing matter of doing business in Ethiopian coffee. I hope all this writing has had some use for others wondering and being excited about what’s going on here, even if I’m sure a few of the details I’ve put down are wrong or not founded on all the facts. Thanks for reading, now to wait for new crop samples to come in!
Thank you Ethiopia!
Anette
Ethiopia, November 2011: 4
SATURDAY
Oh man, early mornings and me just don’t get on… 7am and heading back to Dilla to visit the Chelba washing station that we bought from a couple of years ago. Dile, our awesome grumpy driver with a heart of gold, and guide, agronomist and Q grader Addis Ababa (same as the city, means ‘new flower’ too, I found out!) patiently answered questions while dodging people, goats and donkeys wandering into the road.
Some of the questions around the trace chemical causing problems when importing Ethiopian coffee to Japan were clarified a bit. Addis told me that a couple of years ago, the problems got to the point that Japan practically stopped buying Ethiopian coffee all together, and in order to resolve the situation the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture dispatched a team to test the soils, waters and other elements that could be to blame. The conclusion was that the likely contaminate was jute bags, since they get re-used for various purposes over periods of up to 10 years, the many functions they would have had was the reason why cross contamination was happening and coffee got traces of chemicals on them. Now, jutebags for coffee have to be unused and will be printed with the year of use on them, so that if one re-surfaces it can be identified and discarded, or the party re-using it will be severely fined.
Being an agronomist, Addis loosely touched upon some subjects regarding growing coffee that I need to pick his brain more on, like the establishment of new coffee research centers back in the mid-70’s aimed at solving the problems Ethiopia was seeing with coffee berry disease. Back then, coffee was 90% of Ethiopias exports, and of course any threats to the crop had to be avoided. They refined and mapped 3 different main structures of trees; like the open 75227, the compact 74110 or 74112 and the semi compact, 7454 being one. (Still not very romantic!) These 3 categories indicate how tall, wide and densely branched the trees look, and some will be more suited to certain climates than others. The 75227 would for example be a tall tree reaching 2.5 meters if allowed, branches spaced far apart allowing lots of sun onto the cherries, and producing medium quantities of coffee. I’m going to try and get some more facts and figures on this when back in town.
Addis have done a lot of research into the changes the EXC has brought to coffee production and producers in Ethiopia, and is very pleased that now, farmers are getting paid maybe three times as much for their cherry as they used to – being more informed and savvy about what the C price is at and how the national and international markets are doing. I still need to sit down and work out what the birr/farsula of parchment-price at the ECX means in £/kg green, and what all the added costs of transport and fees break down to, and how that relates to what importers and roasters pay. If I was better at maths I probably wouldn’t feel so broken-headed by the complex systems and layers of the trade here, every time I think I’ve worked something out I speak to someone new who tells me I’m wrong or that I’ve not considered an element I didn’t even know existed. Everyone here is friendly and helpful, but sometimes it’s a bit like pulling teeth in that people might only tell you the minimum of information required, not offering up additional facts or figure that would explain discrepancies, things that seem out of context or downright unfeasible. To add to my confusion, it seems the government and the ECX likes to change or make new rules on a regular basis too, so keeping up with it all seems hard enough for those who are based here and see it every day.
For example, rules now say that coffee- once the contract is registered- has to be shipped out within four months. If you register your contract on January 1st with a shipment window of Mar/Apr your coffee has to ship by April 30th or you’ll be fined and suspended from registering another contract or exporting anything else till the backlog is cleared. From the governments side this is done to prevent hoarding of stocks in times when there is much speculation on prices going up, making sure the money expected to come in a the stipulated time does indeed come in, and I guess also to prevent coffee from going old in storage damaging the quality reputation of Ethiopia. While of course there are benefits of moving coffee out quickly from a storage perspective, many exporters feel that the quality will not necessarily suffer as long as the greens are kept well in parchment or cherry up until a reasonable time of export. But there are certain complications to this deadline of two months as well, for example the way it puts pressure on shipping samples to be sent off half way around the world in time for cupping and approval. Not to mention what would happen should the samples not be approved in time due to unforeseen circumstances that are not really anyones fault- but punishes the whole chain if it gets delayed.
Another thing that has been boggling my mind is talk of a directive introduced just a couple of weeks ago, that says coffee should be exported in fully lined containers as opposed to jutebags. Apparently this was done by (I believe) the Ministry of Trade to prevent certain issues they see as detrimental to the coffee: it would reduce the weightloss from spiking every jutebag to collect pre-ship samples, to eliminate the cost of the jutebag itself, and avoid any contamination issues the coffee could face in transport to Djibouti. But of course, the cons for coffee buyers is that not everyone is capable of receiving a containerload of coffee at a time and you can’t ship mixed containers of different lots or regions. I think somewhere like Japan, who only just started buying Ethiopian coffee again, won’t allow bulk shipping like this because they collect samples from smaller unit bag to check for chemical contaminates. The general opinion is that this directive will need to be overturned, and fast, as the logistics of pulling this off are just not doable, and will cause all sorts of issues not just for exporters but importers and buyers alike.
Driving long distances every day helps with digesting the information that comes in rapid fire every time we stop at a farm, a washing station or an exporter, but most of the time in the car I’m just captivated by the scenes flying past. The road from Addis to Yirgacheffe changes so much in character, from the endless industrial zones on the outskirts of Addis fading into the yellow fields of taf, the shimmering lakes between Ziway and Negele, the grassy plains leading up to the two mountains marking the start of Sidamo, and the climb up into ever more green and lush surroundings as coffee trees start to appear. Every now and then you can see a priest dressed in the most colourful cloak sat patiently by the road collecting money, but most of all it’s bustling with people pitched up to sell anything from gasoline to onions, chat to little carved chairs. Graves appear with regular intervals in the lowland (I say low but it’s still 1600 masl), where traditionally people are buried near their houses so their souls remain at home. They are often more like little monuments, richly decorated with pictures and words depicting the loved one. One particular grave that’s been catching my eye when I pass is one with a statue of an ox on one side, showing that the person resting here was a hard working farmer. On the other side of the headstone is a sculpture of a lion, speaking of his strength as a powerful man, and like all Ethiopians a very proud person.
Next to piles of drying hay you’ll see cattle being walked around in circles, threshing the spread out layer of grains under their hooves. A little whirlwind was whisking up a column of dust next to the road out of Heki, a larger one creating a huge cloud of flying pieces of straw, with a little boy running around in the middle trying to catch them all. Draped over bushes and rocks you see colourful clothing and left out to dry in the scorching sun, mothers combing their daughters’ hair, boys playing tether-ball and football, girls skipping rope and kids with wheels and sticks doing what kids with wheels and sticks would be doing in any country. Donkeys roll around in the dusty ditches trying to scratch some itch, and up in the higher grounds you can see certain minerals in the red, exposed soil glimmer in the low sun like specks of silver. Smoke seeps out of the straw rooftops of the gojo bet traditional dwellings, and grown ups and kids alike carry their ubiquitous yellow water containers to the filling station and home. I now know that a good way of doing laundry is by placing a large banana leaf on the ground, your trousers on top, and scrubbing them with soap a brush till they can be rinsed in a stream. In front of some houses you’ll see a bowl or a cup, or pieces of yellow or pink cloth hung up on a frame signaling that this house will sell you home made meals and drinks, and herds of cattle take their baths in rivers, cooling off in the rushing waters while their owners rest in the shade.
Another herd I’ve seen only sporadically is the camel herds of the Afar tribe, who are nomadic and move around on the lower plains. Covering an area of the countryside that is also well suited for growing sugar cane has recently brought with it some changes or opportunity for this tribe, as the government in a trade off for using some of the land for this new crop have given some infrastructure like irrigation and schools. The tribe have taken the project on as their own chance to control how they move with the times without loosing their identity. The irrigation for example means they can grow grass for their camels and move around less to find pasture, freeing up more land for uninterrupted sugar cane production. They now produce enough sugar here to cover national consumption and have some spare to export too.
Stopping for lunch by the lovely Lake Awasa I got up close and personal with some very cheeky monkeys- I know James will be very jealous of this one! But finally, about 25 km south of Dilla we pulled off the road and through the Chelba washing station gates. As we parked up I suddenly felt like spending a bit less time looking at machinery and washing tanks that I normally do, and more time hanging out with the Chelba crew. So after many curious looks and smiles I pulled out my polaroid to help break the silence, resulting in a full on photo shoot where about 30 of the guys and girls crowded round to have their image captured and handed over. After that it was great to just wander around and having them show off how the structure there works, smell the difference in parchment with 1 day vs 6 days on the drying beds, take pictures with Hussein the very handsome site manager and basically just relax as dusk fell, mist started coming in and the noise of the crickets took over from the machines and trucks.
Staying in a hotel in Dilla tonight, currently the bar staff if playing ‘Alejandro’ on the stereo and I’m having flashbacks to Bogota and Andres, very odd.
SUNDAY
Sunday morning bright and early we set off to meet the owner of a farm very close to our hears at Square Mile, Suke Quto, the one who grew the coffee John used to win the UKBC! Tesfaye had a meeting in Awasa so was not going to be able to meet us at the farm, so we met for breakfast in Dilla instead- and I was able to convey Johns gratitude for producing such lovely, award winning beans! Tesfaye grows his own coffee and works with 40 outgrowers who deliver to his washing station as well, exporting about 8 containers of coffee in a harvest. As with everyone else, work at the processing station has just begun as cherry is delayed by 1-2 months across the board. In Tesfayes case, the rains that fell in February kicking off the normal season was great, the trees were full of flowers and the harvest forecast was looking good. Then the expected March rains didn’t come, and almost all of April went by without any more showers too. By the time the rain came back the February flowers had already wilted and dropped. Confused but wired to reproduce, the trees produced a new flowering in early May, but it’s not as full as the first one and the crop is projected to be smaller than last year. This is of course a financial challenge, but Tesfaye hopes the market will allow for him to pay both his outgrowers and staff more money this year in spite of the reduced volume. With the combined skill of Tesfaye who holds a degree in Natural Resource Management, the beautifully set up mill and a team of skilled processors, quality should not suffer and I’m really looking forward to samples of the finished product.
Tesfaye filled me in a bit on the history of Suke Quto, which is very much a labor of love for coffee but also the nature and landscape it grows within. The farm is named after a tree that grows in the local area, which is in the Shakiso district and also part of a huge gold mining- zone. Some years ago there was a massive forest fire that took out a the forest and any chance it might recover, so people started encroaching on the cleared land left behind they and began growing food crops. Tesfaye saw an opportunity to grow coffee in the fertile soil, but only a few people in the area knew anything about growing coffee and to start with he was met with some resistance. Taking it slow he began planting coffee along the borders of the encroachment area, 5 hectares at first but now it’s grown to 291 hectares. But preserving the natural forest is key for Tesfaye, and he says there are still more natural trees on the land than coffee trees. As he respectfully puts it: ‘Coffee is income, but trees are life”. The forests full of birds, monkeys and other wildlife, he’s happy to live in symbiosis with what was there first, laughing at the notion that he collects only the cherries that the birds couldn’t be bothered eating first!
When Tesfaye started up he didn’t go to buy seedlings from any nursery growing one of the 26 varietals researched and developed by the government, he looked at the coffee trees that were in the area already and chose the healthiest, highest yielding ones to collect seeds from. This is still how he works, and right now he has a separate nursery site where 150 000 seedlings are maturing, ready to be divided up and planted on his own farm as well as the farms of the outgrowers. He has plans to convert some steep slopes on his land from shrubs and low tree growth to coffee, slopes which form two sides of a valley, and he’s interested to see what difference in taste he will get depending on whether the coffee trees get the sun in the morning or in the afternoon. Coffee grown here will help bind the soil and keep erosion at bay while at the same time increasing his production capacity, hopefully preserving both the future of the land and the future of his family. With a baby on the way in March, there might soon be someone to help carry on that way of thinking. I’m really pleased I go the chance to meet with him this morning, and after all that I was really looking forward to seeing the place for myself. The drive to the washing station was going to be a good few hours on bumpy roads, so we planned to meet for a cupping in Addis on Saturday and set off in each our direction.
The road to Suke Quto, moving you from the Gedeo to the Guji zone, must be one of the most heartbreakingly beautiful areas in the world. Thinking back to Harar I might as well have been on a different planet, the land here so green and fertile, and mist drifting in through the valleys casting a dream-like veil over the forests. As we climbed to 2100 masl we passed through villages teeming with life, one where an ongoing livestock market meant every adult and child along the road was walking, coercing or chasing animals of all sizes trying to get them to move in the right direction. Here where the land can support them, I’ve been seeing a lot more cows and horses than goats and donkeys, and heading towards Uraga the land turned from dense forest to arable land, neatly divided into plots of pasture weaving soft patterns along the hillsides. Here life seemed to trundle along much as it does most places on a Sunday, women gossiping over the lattice fencing, young sweethearts shyly letting go of each others hands as we got near, ladies riding along on their horses protecting themselves from the sun with umbrellas, toddlers caring for and playing with their baby brothers and sisters, groups of girls braiding each others hair. I find myself thinking of my grandma, who grew up on a farm and married a farmer, never left the country and probably never even had a conversation with an African, Asian or Latin-American person. I think she would have enjoyed it, and I wish she was still around to hear about the places that her granddaughter is able to go to now.
Anyway, it seemed we drove for hours but all of a sudden we rounded a corner and there was the mill! While this time last year the beds were full of parchment, only a few of them are now in use, and only to dry full cherry. With a few early pickings coming in only in drips and drabs it’s not yet worthwhile cranking up the whole washing station, but Tesfaye expected it to only be a matter of weeks till the pulpers are up and running. Addis Alem who had driven with us from Dilla and up here put on an impromptu coffee ceremony for us, a lovely surprise and very idyllic sat in the shed covering the receiving tank. The green coffee, hand washed to remove all silverskin, was thrown on a hot pan and roasted, the beans crushed in a mortar and coffee and water poured into a traditional spouted jar called jebena to steep. Once the grounds had settled she poured us the first round, the abol, the strongest and grittiest brew. You normally drink three rounds, adding more hot water but not more coffee to the jar ad you go, so that the second round is the medium most balanced one, and the third is thin and quite weak.
Pulling out my polaroid I was really pleased to be able to take a picture of everyone there that day, especially Addis Alem as she is pregnant with her fourth and looking rather radiant! But we wanted to see the Suke Quto nursery before dark and only managed the one round of coffee before we had to leave. Via Wonago and Shakiso city which was heaving with people, music and the smell of coffee roasting, we made our way into a clearing in the forest where the seedlings are kept, near to the three things you need for a good nursery: access to infrastructure, a permanent water source and well drained loamy topsoil. Having a nursery at all is not feasible for all growers, so they might be better off buying in some young trees from the government. But here, rolls of mixed red earth sand and compost were piled up ready to be planted into, the seeds having been dried gently in the shade to preserve the integrity of the parchment. Placed in a roll of soil at about 1.5 cm deep, the seeds germinate after about 45 days, first coming up as ‘soldiers’ – the tap root lifting the parchment up out of the earth before breaking it off and progressing to the butterfly stage of the cotyledons. It will take about 8 months before the seedlings are ready to be planted out in the field, so while still growing into their target 8 pairs of leaves, what looked like 6 month old plants were placed snugly in row after row, under covers of straw to protect them from the strong sun. The cover will occasionally be removed for some periods of time to toughen the plants up readying them for their permanent position in the farm.
Ready to see the forest where this coffee comes from, we drove via Giroosari to the outskirts of Suke Quto farm at 2000 masl. With the last rain having fallen about a week ago the ground was dry on the surface but the trees looked healthy, this section still in green cherry but other parts nearing ripe. The roughly 7 year old, 3m tall trees were sat in among quite a dense forest, with soft, springy soil telling of the deep layer of nutrients available. Farm manager Zarihun Admasu was on hand to explain more about how they might prune or stump when required and how they plant the young trees in their permanent locations. I’m really pleased I’ve been able to see the three parts of Suke Quto and have a greater understanding of how it all comes together, and I’m excited to see samples when they’re ready in a few months.
Leaving Suke Quto behind we drove the short distance to a neighbouring farm where we were going to spend the night. Located on a slope leading up from a small river, it’s a very idyllic setting, but just across the river they were actually digging for gold, this land being valuable for more than just coffee. Owner Haile gave us a warm welcome and had a huge late lunch spread ready for us, so putting the farm visit aside for tomorrow we were treated to a coffee ceremony performed by one of his seven daughters. I had a go at the roasting portion myself, but left the call on when it was done to her- roasting over coal is not my specialty! A big barbecue was then set alight and while the bed of coal grew ever hotter, everyone sat around having a drink and a good catch up. Ever the animal lover I found Tuk Tuk the dog so spent a fair bit of time scratching him behind his ears, until the fire was ready to start roasting the goat that had been slaughtered for our dinner. Over chunks of sweet, tender meat we talked football, gold, hair braiding techniques, Ethiopian dancing and practiced how to count in each others languages. For once conversation wasn’t all about coffee! Finishing the meal with a bowl of delicious soup I felt I might end up asleep in my chair, so I’ve settled into my sleeping bag on the camping beds that they kindly set up for our comfort. I think I’m going to be out like a light any minute now so – till tomorrow!
MONDAY
Woken up by the sound of kitten paws scratching around on the floor, it all felt very much like home! Walking out in to the cool morning air and getting wet shoes from the dewy grass between drying beds: definitely not anything like home. While waiting for the rest of the household to wake up I picked some cherries off a tree next to the house and had a great demonstration of what can happen when a tree is stressed out and off balance by growing in less than ideal soil: off the same branch I got a regular cherry with two seeds, a single peaberry and also a triple seeded cherry. Haile told me the triple was very unusual and a sign of good luck, so I’m smuggling this one home to plant it it- all my former attempts of starting a coffee plantation on my windowsill have so far failed so maybe this will be my breakthrough!
The farm tour began with an overview of the coffee growing area. According to Haile, he can identify three different taste profiles from the trees on his land, a Yirga Cheffe quality in the western part, a Sidamo cup from the north slopes, and a Harar-like taste in the eastern fields. He attributes this phenomenon to the fact that his land is under a migratory route for birds, who might be picking up varietals from these areas and dropping them along their path. Having owned this 320 hectare farm for 9 years and keen to find out exactly what he is working with, he’s identified 5 core varietals that grow here and is currently exploring their individual characteristics with a view to intensify production of the best ones.
In the forest, he has a stock of 360 mother trees that provide seeds for the nursery on site, and as we walked through the covered rows of young plants I was very honoured to be invited to plant two coffee trees myself. I planted them along one of the rows so that in the future they can help to produce shade for the seedlings, and if I come back in a couple of years my little trees might be full of cherry themselves! Heading over to some the newly constructed eucalyptus drying beds, the passion for his work coming through in Haile’s word were really great to hear, with his two main philosophies of satisfaction for the consumers and protection of the environment being at the core. Carrying on maintaining and building relationships through trust, integrity and two-way communication is what this man sees as the only way to do business.
A short drive to the top of the northern slopes had us on the edge of the 200 meter buffer zone surrounding the coffee trees, providing protection from the dusty roads but also acting as little natural reserve corridors for plants and animals. Even beyond this buffer zone of trees there are still about 200 tall and medium sized non-coffee trees per hectare, providing shade of different intensities and giving options for photosynthesis management throughout the season. Haile explained how they work the topsoil and undergrowth in rhythm with the rain to maximise the water retention, and as rain is expected very shortly we came across one of the field teams in full swing cutting clearings around each tree to give the rain access to the roots. The cuttings are left to compost and add nutrients back into the ground, completing the cycle.
Back in Dilla tonight, an early night for me as the lack of sleep traveling is starting to take it’s toll. The next few days will be a marathon of co-ops, which I’m looking forward to but want to be rested for!
TUESDAY
The first stop this morning was the Negele Gorbito co-op, which is under the Oromia Union and situated at about 2000 masl, 30 bumpy minutes off the main road. Aiele the representative from the Oromia Union and Musrat the co-op manager gave us a warm welcome and shows us around the site where this year, 1094 members will deliver their cherry.
The size of farms that these members have are bout 1-2 hectares, so a fair amount of land that last year, in a low production year and then with only 904 members, provided 5-6 export containers. This season they’ve been receiving cherry for 3 weeks, and so far 30 000 kg’s have been bought at 15 birr/kg. They’re gearing up to be able to process 1.5 million kg’s washed and 500 000 kg’s sun dried this year, easily tripling last year’s output.
Walking down to the tanks the gentleman raking the parchment explained how he could tell by the sound if there was still mucilage left on the cover, and whether it was time to rinse and post-soak. Grabbing a quick cup of coffee and a picture with a dapper looking chap in a traditional shawl, it was time to say goodbye and we headed to co-op two for the day; Homa.
Homa is another co-op under the Oromia Union and headed up by young manager Takele Tardesse. With 789 members it’a a smaller co-op who have suffered from some mismanagement in the past, but are now headed for brighter more stable days and hope to near double the output of last year, to 1 million kg cherry. Member farms range in size from 1.75 to 6 hectares, forming a total of 3450 hectares coffee growing land. Traditionally they’ve only done washed coffee here but this year the’ve planned to do 400 000 kg sun dried too, experimenting with ways to expand and maximise the potential of the production. They have 73 raised beds but will build more to accommodate both the volume increase overall as well as the longer drying time needed for the naturals. So far this season the average price paid per kg has been 14 birr/kg, and compared to the full season average of 8.86 birr/kg from last year, it says something about how high even internal prices are, not to mention the end price for roasters and consumers.
A nice thing we saw here was an element of pre-sorting; as members bring their baskets or bags of cherry in they are poured on to wenfit screens and divided into ripe and unripe before going on to the receiving tanks. Only the ripe cherries are purchased by the co-op, while the unripes might go back with the grower for home use. One of the members here, Ture Dembe, took us on a short walk from the co-op to his 1.5 hectare plot, where trees full of ripe cherry spoke of the happy days ahead for him in selling his production!
As visits took longer than planned and clouds gathered the hope of seeing 5 co-ops today started looking slim. If it started to rain we’d have problems on the steep dirt roads, so we decided to get just one more done and set off towards Hafursa. They are under the header of the Yirgacheffee Union, and have 1038 members. Last year they did 547 000 kg cherry but are projecting for 900 000 kg this season. Since opening 10 days ago they’ve done 6000 kg, but for now they’re only doing sun drieds. In a few days they hope supply is steady and high enough to warrant cranking up the pulper, and by the time they hit peak season they want to be doing 30 000 kg each day. As opposed to the concrete receiving tanks I’ve seen so far, Hafursa has a metal version, very smart looking but best of all easy to clean. With pre-sorting for only the ripest cherries in place and a Pinhalense demucilager to process them, this place also has the advantage of being able to skip the 36 hour fermentation soak going straight into a wash and 12 hr rinse. Members can deliver straight to this mill but Hafursa actually have 5 stations in their areas where people can deliver to, also here currently at an average price of 15 birr/kg. No one can quite tell me if this price will stay this high. As cherry comes in in higher volumes it could decline but prices last year, even if lower overall, increased throughout he season. This being a better crop year might keep that from happening, but things for now seem a bit uncertain.
As we headed back to Dilla a few drops of rain threatened, but since it stayed dry in the end we went for a meal of tibs at a newly opened restaurant down the road from the hotel, bumping into the only resident American in town. 24 year old Matt is here for 2 years teaching English, and was able to fill us in on life in Dilla from a local’s perspective. Tipping us off that the rooftop of the restaurant was actually a nightclub, we decided to turn a Tuesday school night into disco-time, being the only people up there besides the DJ no hindrance for a bit of bad bopping around and lots of laughs. Last night I slept on a coffee farm, tonight I danced to Ethiopian reggae on a roof terrace. It ain’t all bad being in coffee, even if you end up staying in some pretty rough hotels out here in the countryside. Just now as I was typing waiting for my hair to dry after a long awaited shower, a little cockroach crawled through my fringe past my eyes… I do not know how he ended up in my hair but I sure know that he’s now flat under a shoe. My animal loving nature sadly doesn’t stretch to this sort of up close and personal with creepy crawlies!
Ethiopia, November 2011: 3
FRIDAY
A rare chance to sleep in wasn’t exploited as I woke at 7am ready for more coffee! Hopping in a taxi and handing my phone with Mike at the other end to the driver, we made our way to Moplaco’s Addis HQ and were greeted by office manager Girma. He took us through to the cupping lab where lab technician Hannah fired up the sample roaster, while her assistant Gante helped me set up the bowls for cupping some coffee I brought with. Hannah chose a Washed Yirga Cheffe PB for us to taste (peaberries and screen 13 down), I asked to try the Lekempti, and a couple of roasts later we had a table of El Salvador and Ethiopia to compare.
The PB, even at the tail end of the crop, was classically Yirga Cheffe-ian in aroma and flavour, with bergamot, lime and spice, while the Lekempti sadly was a bit nutty, dry and popcorn-like. Hannah found the Kilimanjaro Pulped to be very citrusy and not so much to her liking, but really enjoyed the Natural with its fruit, berries and sweetness. Running a bit behind schedule we had a quick tour of their warehouse, a massive, pristinely clean, tidy and well organized space where coffee first goes through a rough sorting for metal, sticks and other foreign matter, a destoner, a polisher, density sorters and optical colour sorting before being passed on to the hand sorters. The colour sorter worked fast, each of the 18 lenses were currently set to check 3 kgs of beans per minute, blowing the off coloured ones out of the stream of beans with a precisely targeted jet of air. Still, a finishing round of hand sorting adds a human element to the process that can’t be underestimated, and this warehouse employs 350 women during peak for this last and final quality control.
The second stop in the day was in many ways the core of what I came her to learn about, the auction rooms at the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange. On the outside of the building are mounted large screens which show the live update prices of the coffees that were being bought and sold inside. Trader Dagem Tadesse was on hand to guide us through the process, starting with getting us through security who were not too pleased to see my camera! But once allowed in, we took our seats behind the glass wall of the viewing room to watch the action on the floor. I did manage to sneak some (very bad)pictures of it all on my cellphone, so I might try to get that up here a bit later.
Even the lowest grades of coffees are traded at the ECX, but only sold for internal consumption. Any coffee staying for the local market is traded in the morning, while the export lots are traded between 2p and 5pm. They are handled by area, so the Limus all get processed in one round, then they do the Sidamos, then the Yirgacheffes and so on (not necessarily in that order!). Due to it being Friday and many people having church that morning, when we arrived just after 2pm they were also doing some rescheduled internal coffee.
So the scene of the ECX is an octagonal sunken floor with large screens on the wall opposite where we’re sat watching through the glass. One screen lists the ‘reference markets’, which for coffee was the New York C price for March deliveries, at 237.5 cents/lb. A ‘change’ value of 0.55 indicated the increase in the unit price since the trading started at 2pm.
Another screen listed the type of coffee being traded in each session, and as we arrived they were on Unwashed Local By Product Coffee. The symbol/code for one of the lots on offer was a 3LUBP3 AA, signifying that it was a rather anonymous lot from crop year 2003 by the Ethiopian calendar Local Unwashed By Product quality 3, stored in the Addis Ababa warehouse. Later on we moved on to some export lots, and one of the first new crop lots I’ve seen, a very early Limu. The code for this was 4WLMA3 JM, meaning 2004 Washed LiMu A grade 3 JiMmah warehouse. Make sense? Also listed next to this was the ‘Last’ price: 1340 which is what this type of coffee closed at yesterday, and the ‘Range’ set for trading today: 1340 +/- 5%, so 1273-1407. I haven’t fully done the maths and confirmed it but I believe that the 1340 is birr per farsula, which is 17 kgs. Bare with me, I’ll double check this asap.
So with the offers and price ranges listed the sellers of the lots on screen gather in the sunken octagon with any interested buyers. While there could be just one seller and one buyer there is usually several of each, and often more of one than the other. If you are a seller you wear a green coat, if you’re buying for the local market you wear a blue one, and if you’re buying for export you’re in khaki- all jackets printed with identifying numbers on the back- sort of like football shirts! At the sound of a bell 10 minutes to complete business starts on the clock. Pace, alertness and skill is of the essence, as negotiations between the parties may start slow but finish quick, and it seemed fascinatingly chaotic to me as an onlooker. There is much shouting, shaking of heads, uninterested glances and cheeky grins to see as they walk around each other fishing to see who might bite. The body language is great to watch, from the ‘I don’t need your money’ glare to the corresponding ‘I don’t need your coffee’ pose. But if a sale is close, the seller and buyer will both raise a hand and if they agree, they’ll do a little high-five to seal the deal and I find myself cheering them on in my head to get to that high-five before the end of the 10 minutes. Sometimes nothing got sold, sometimes one buyer would high-five 3 sellers in quick succession in the very last seconds.
The parties then approach a window where they fill in each their slip of paper identifying them by their personal coat numbers, coffee and price details and pass them to the clerk for entering into the computer. The clerk checks that the buyer has enough money deposited to complete the purchase, approves it, and the bank transaction immediately sets the money in movement to the sellers account. They have the security of knowing that with this system, the money will pretty much be in their possession at 2pm in trade+1 day, while buyers need to plan their budget for possibly being out of pocket on a coffee for up to 3 months before they sell it on and get paid by buyers and roasters in importing countries.
A nice surprise was to see Haileselassie knocking on the glass and waiving to us, wearing his khaki coat ready to buy some beans. He wasn’t too happy with the prices he got offered so no luck today, but I was lucky and got a quick photo with him- safely off the floor so the guards didn’t confiscate the camera!
The second stop of the day was the offices of Ambasa, where we had the pleasure of meeting with the wonderfully charming chairman Mr. Geoffrey Wetherell, who came to Ethiopia for the first time during the war in 1941 and liked it so much he returned with his wife 6 years later and set up a coffee business. General Manager Degu Assefa took us to the cupping room to present to us some of the coffees they have been working with in the last year, and again the grade 2 Yirga Cheffe, even this late in its season, reminded me of how much I miss the bergamoty yirgs that seem so few and far in between these days. Also a Q grader, Dagem felt that while he trusts in the judgement of the graders of the EXC he wondered if they were sometimes too strict, as finding coffees graded as ‘1’s is becoming harder and increasingly rare. When it comes to shipping, these small quantities of grade 1’s are sadly often blended in with grade 2’s in order to fill the container with something that can be sold as Grade 2 and still specialty- but which really is an average of the higher and lower end of that spectrum.
A whirlwind tour of the warehouse before they shut for the day showed me how much history is in this company, beautifully maintained old stone and wood buildings, vintage equipment preserved next to more modern versions and archives of museum-worthy items documenting decades in the Ethiopian coffee industry. Slightly further out of town Ambasa do have a newer warehouse that opens in the peak season to take some of the load off the old facility, a massive state of the art building where Pinhalense machines were poised and ready for the busy season to start in a couple of months. Site manager Conor will then be in charge of a huge crew, so I told him to enjoy the calm before the storm, and to go tend to the coffee tree in the courtyard whenever he tires of the chattering of the 250 women needed just to handsort the already near perfect coffee in a final clean before export!
Tomorrow I head south again and will probably be offline for a week, so lucky you- no more longwinded post for a bit!
Ethiopia, November 2011: 2
(Warning, long post! Internet is a bit of a headache but I’ll continue to add pics and video when I can!)
TUESDAY
6 am and back in the car headed for Yirga Cheffe town guided by Mike from Moplaco, who is bravely facing the 9 hour drive south into the Sidamo region. Drive for 9 hours in Ethiopia and you sure get to see some stark contrasts. You pull out onto the road in Addis and in between the lorries the motorcycles and the Tuk Tuks you also get flocks of goats and cattle being herded through the roundabouts, and horses and donkeys pulling carts piled high with wares headed to market. One of the first sights leaving Addis is the Eastern Industrial Zone. As part of their free trade agreement an enormous compound has been given to the Chinese by the Ethiopian government so they can build 122 factories and housing for employees. While disastrous for local factories, it would also create thousands of new jobs, and the impact this all has on the local economy is profound. Slightly further south, a Chinese owned cement factory recently spewed out enough polluting fumes to close down the local, rather large poultry farm, causing the cost of an egg in Addis to go from 0.8 birr to 2.5 birr.
Side by side with these factories, people are scattered in fields, hunched over in the sun cutting the injera base-grain tef with large knives, gathering the harvest by hand and piling it up to dry. A constant stream of people walking, walking, walking, toddlers playing on the roadside and animals wandering all over grazing on whatever they find. The traffic on roads both big and small is busy and chaotic, but even with passing two severe car accidents, some wild pig road kill and seeing some goats knocked over by a truck (they were ok in the end!), I still was happier in the car than I was being told my plane was having ‘mechanical problems’. Mike did some great driving and the landscape is just so fascinating to watch, I never tire of it.
Just around Debre Zeyit town and it’s seven surrounding volcanic lakes, we hit the famous Rift Valley. At Mojo we took the exit south towards Shashemene, and passing Lake K’ok’a an interesting discussion about how the growth in the flower farming industry might be influencing coffee came up. Recently more and more Ethiopian coffee has been showing traces of chemicals in them, in spite of the fact that farms here can’t afford to use chemicals to fertilize or control pests and are by default organic. One of the causes could be that rose farms like the ones near Lake K’ok’a do use chemicals (a lot, you can almost smell it in the air) and that these wash out into the rivers leading off the lake into coffee growing regions. Another possible cause could be that as the health authorities spray houses for Malaria, any coffee which might be drying or in storage inside the houses also get sprayed and thus get flagged when we test for contaminates.
Passing through Ziway we decided to pull off the road at Lake Langamo for a quick coffee and some breakfast, much needed as the early start and 34 degrees C at 9:30 am was starting to cause a bit a drowsiness at least on my part. Refuelled it was onwards through the cute little town of Negele where I suddenly noticed what was to become a common sight as we went on: lots of roadside pingpong and foosball tables – I kinda wanted to pull over for a game but we had to rush on! At about 2000 masl the landscape started becoming a lot more green and lush, such a contrast to dry, dusty Harar, and the vegetation changed in, well, many ways. Hitting Shashemene Mike explained that this was the spiritual home of Rastafarians in Ethiopia- emperor Haile Selassie was a holy person for Rastafarians in Jamaica and so many made the pilgrimage to the emperors palace in this little town. Many were given land and settled, and in between their rasta history museum and pictures of Bob Marley you could certainly smell the distinct aroma of another rastafarian influence. Seems that if you feel like indulging in something other than chat, Shashemene is the place to go! Kids will freely com up and offer you ‘medicine’ in code names like ‘marlboro’ or ‘marlboro light’ – depending on your level of… expertise.
We briefly paused just outside Awasa, the capital of Sidamo, to have a cup of coffee with Phil and Ed from Schluter who just so happened to be accompanied by Mr. Haileselassie Ambaye, the man behind our Kebado Dara! He’s been in coffee for close to 20 years, in the local market selling coffee to the akrabis (the owners of the washing stations, here in Yirgacheffe also called suppliers), as an akrabi himself, and for the last 6 years also working as an exporter. He now has 18 people working in his office, is building a new dry mill and is investing in new trucks for transport, so I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes from here.
Heading out of Awasa, the road led through a mountain pass that marked the beginning of Southern Ethiopia and our destination; the coffee lands of Sidamo. With the changes in global climate conditions, rains came late this year and at unfortunate times, so while the washing stations here are normally in full swing in November, this year they’re either completely quiet or just starting on the first pickings. The rains that came late essentially knocked a large portion of the flowers off the trees, cutting cherry development in Sidamo by around 20% of expected levels. Around Yirga Cheffe specifically they might do a bit better, but it’s just another hurdle that the growers here don’t need. Many are turning to growing chat for chewing or eucalyptus trees to produce trunks for the construction of houses, which depletes the soil of nutrients that the coffee trees sorely need, further complicating the matter. In order to help the situation, the Ministry of Agriculture have for the last 5 years been encouraging people in Yirga Cheffe to plant more trees, especially of natural, local hybrids like Curume but also Dega, Woolisho and ones developed by the University Research Centre in Djimmah: 74158, 74114 and 74110. Not the most romantic names but they were developed to suit this Gedeo tribe area specifically and give higher yields. A fairly reasonable price of 10 birrs will buy you 6-7 coffee plants, but only time will tell if this will help turn the trend.
As we slowly climbed higher into Sidamo, we started seeing a lot of small garden farms along the road, and reaching Yirga Alem (I’m told it means something like ‘settled/restful world’ while Yirga Cheffe means ‘settled/restful wet grass/marsh) discussion turned to how these tiny producers get their coffee sold. In a system slightly different to Harar, the coffees here are often collected by people called brokers, who are either sent out by akrabis to collect certain coffee or who collect their own selection and sell the cherries on to the akrabis. Growers can sell direct to the washing station, but where they don’t you’ll see the brokers going from house to house with a collection bag and a measuring bowl for the cherries. Currently the internal market is very high, and 1kg of red cherry would collect about 13-16 birr in Yirgacheffe. You’d need about 6 kgs of cherry to make 1 kg of green coffee. The price that these growers get is not governed by the ECX, so it is up to the brokers and washing stations to set this price. However, the EXC controls how much the washing stations get for their coffee, so if the margins become too tight there- problems will ensue. The concern is that this would return the full control of how much growers are paid back to the government- not a desirable prospect for many.
Just outside of Dila we briefly left Sidamo and drove through a tiny sliver of Oromian land, signified by two control posts about a 3 minute drive apart. Oromia and their tribe is the largest grouping in Ethiopia, and there is movement towards their wanting a possible separation from the rest of the country. While the smaller Amharic tribe speak the official language of the country, in Oromia many schools have now stopped teaching Amharic to the children, further deepening the divide between the two tribal cultures.
In Dilla, the capital of Yirga Cheffe Gedeo area, we passed by the warehouse where the EXC store their Yirga Cheffe coffees (the Sidamos are kept in the Awasa warehouse where we’ll go on Thursday) Along the roadside piles of waste pulp from local washing stations started appearing, brought there as free fertilizer for the farmers. These piles quickly become a bit funky, so I was grateful to also start smelling lovely wafts of coffee roasting from many of the houses. Finally, after 9 hours and 15 minutes we arrived in Yirga Cheffe. At the Moplaco warehouse in Adame I picked up a bag of parchment so I can try making Hoja, I have no great hopes that it’ll be very tasty but at least it’ll be an experience!
More details on how the ECX works when it comes to dealing with washed coffees as opposed to sun dried had to be clarified, so a round of questions were thrown at the very patient Mike. From what I gather, the suppliers once in possession of the red cherries will pulp them, soak them for the neccessary time to ferment the pulp off, then rinse, maybe re-soak, and spread the pergamino out to dry. Drying takes an average of about 7 days, and at the correct export level of humidity and ready to sell to the ECX it is bagged into 60 kg bags, still in pergamino. Like in Harar, the lot size that will go to the ECX has to be 30 of these bags. A washing station that qualifies to be a co-op (min.18 members and 30 hectares of land) can sell direct to an international buyer but to sell to an Ethiopian exporter they have to go via the ECX.
We also ran into Mr. Ferenju Defar, one of the most successful coffee producers in Yirga Cheffe and owner of 5 washing stations. He fills about 17 trucks of coffee in a season, and makes about 270 000 birr on each of them. He has been speculating a bit and was worried about losing money this year, as prices have been unstable. 6 months ago and still today, internal prices for coffee are high, in part due to the high demand and the late harvest. Many also wish to pay good money so they can ensure a steady supply from growers and brokers, and pay their staff well so that they will be loyal and form an efficient, solid crew. The akrabis pay good money thinking they’ll sell it on at a higher price still, but the (unrelated) prices at the exchange (who base their prices on where NY is at and what the previous day’s closing prices were like) and the international market have dropped, and many akrabis are facing a situation where they might have to sell their coffees for less than what they paid for it.
A day in the coffee harvesting season here usually runs something like this: cherries are picked in the morning to early afternoon, brokers collect them in the late afternoon, deliveries to the washing stations take place just before dark and pulping happens at night. As the crop is late, what we saw was the very early pickings in such small quantities that many growers instead of selling fresh cherry off to be washed, were sun drying the coffee themselves on mats in their front yards. They get a better price for the dried cherry as there is added value in some of the processing work already being done, but it’s also a risk for the brokers to buy these as the quality of the cherry is much harder to determine.
It felt like time to see one of these washing stations in action, and although early in the harvest we found that one of the Yirga Cheffe stations belonging to Alemau Birhano had started processing. He has six stations, some of them also in Sidamo. We arrived at dusk, just in time to find a team of ladies finishing the hand picking of parchment on the drying tables, sorting out the damaged, crushed and pinched beans caused by a pulper adjusted to a ‘less than ideal medium’ setting for an early harvest consisting of great variation in bean size. Singing as they worked, it was quite the sight. (video to come!) They expect to do about 30 trucks of 120-150 bags each out of this station in the coming harvest. As the sun set, we returned to the hotel for dinner and to wait for 9pm when we would head back and watch the pulping of the morning’s harvest.
Alemayu Birhano is different from many washing stations in that it uses underground water pumped up from a well to wash the coffee, rather than water from the river. We watched as the bags of cherry from one broker was lifted off the lorry to be weighed and loaded into the holding tank. From there the cherries passed through a pulper, got floated and separated into Grades 1, 2 and 3, and channeled off into three separate fermentation tanks. There they will stay for about 36 hours before being channeled on and rinsed clean of the pulpy remnants, before going into another tank for a final 16 hour rinse. In the darkness with the fog and two or three lamp posts casting a golden haze over the scene, I have to say it was quite magical to watch the crew work, to smell the pulp and hear them shouting instructions over the noise from the machines and rushing of water. Cameras never do this sort of thing justice and certainly not when placed in my hands, but I tried to capture some of the scene and will add more images soon!
Tomorrow we drive to Sidamo. I can barely cope with all the impressions from today so I’m bracing myself and charging every battery I have for some serious documentation. Other than that, I fed a hungry kitten today and took some polaroids of cute kids, and the starry night sky here is blowing my mind.
WEDNESDAY
Between the disco ending at 1 am and the chanting from the churches starting at 5am, sleep at Lesiwoth – the only hotel in Yirga Cheffe – proved a challenge for this light sleeper. But as they’re currently building the town’s second hotel just down the road, next time I’m here perhaps I’ll have more luck! Nevertheless, starting the morning with an aeropress of Kilimanjaro Pulped cures all gruff! Sitting on the next table over and watching the brewing process with some amusement happened to be Mr. Dakola, another local akrabi who owns several washing stations through Yirga Cheffe and Sidamo. He and his colleague Emnete had a taste of my brew and noted that the coffee had a distinct wine quality to it, so we had a nice chat about varietals and soils and their influence on cup quality.
However the conversation again turned to the ECX. They asked me if I knew why the EXC sometimes go through the whole grading and cupping selection twice for one lot, apparently often resulting in a downgrading of their initial findings. I did not know anything about this but I’m curious if I can find out if this is true and if it is; the reasoning behind it. The Ministry of Agriculture has been known to openly acknowledge that they have no interest in specialty coffee as it’s such a small part of the total coffee trade, while simultaneously keeping certain doors open for the marketing and export of it. Still, the more people I speak to the clearer it is that there is a feeling amongst some suppliers that they are actively being discouraged from producing specialty, and not always without underhanded methods. I look forward to finding out more sides to the story when I actually see the EXC in action and get to speak to some representatives later on this week.
It became time to set off towards Kochere and the lovely little town of Chelelektu. The nearby river Abays recently flooded here and the roads were impressively chewed up because of it, but we made it to a mill where Tesfaye the groundsman and manager Malesa gave us a a quick little tour. Next to the mill is a small coffee plantation where we were able to see another challenge posed by changes in the climate: the trees were being hit by coffee berry disease and turning black on the branch. I also learned that the cutoff point from where garden coffee is considered more as plantation coffee is around 10 hectares, still with some consideration for whether the production of cherry is more haphazard or purposeful. Just nearby we found two lovely ladies drying cherry on beds, and while the little girl at first started crying at the sight of us, she was brave enough to have her picture taken once her mother came to the rescue! For the most part kids run after us smiling waiving and shouting ‘youyouyou’ and ‘ferenj’ (white person), while grown ups look at us with some bemusement when we stop the car to take pictures of trees, goats, signs – anything really, so tears from the little girl was a bit worrying! I’m traveling with a polaroid and try to give a print back to those who kindly pose for me, so I hope the one I took of them and handed over as a thank-you at least made her think we weren’t all that scary after all.
Back north through Fishagenet and Konga, passing rivers where trucks, tuktuks and motorcycles were parked along the bank and given their wash and shine, past hillsides dotted with washing stations, we eventually hit Yirgalem and its Ministry of Agriculture offices. A representative joined us for a trip to see where the coffee collected by farmers and brokers is brought to the akrabis for sale. There are 51 washing stations in this part of Yirgalem (17 of them co-ops) At this one buying station several akrabis have their own rooms where blackboards by the door announce the name of the buying mill and the date and the price they’d currently be paying. One of the washing stations owned by akrabi Mr Debebe Dema was paying 13 birrs per kg and seemed to be doing brisk business; Asafa Waranga who was in charge of buying this afternoon estimated that between 12am and 6pm in a good day he could buy around 10 000 kg cherry from about 560 people. Payment to the sellers isn’t immediate; they all got receipts that they’ll have to bring back in a few days to cash in.
A few doors down the co-op of Goyda was also buying cherry, and I was surprised to learn that they can actually buy from non-members too- but only the members get a share of the profits made. When this happens it obviously further clouds the traceability aspect for international buyers who like to know the specifics of who they’re buying from, but the more I’m learning about how Ethiopia works the more I realize that the complicated grids and layers of their systems are perhaps impossible to ever fully control, or in all honesty- ever fully trust.
Having cleared it with Asafa, we decided to pay a brief visit to Debebe Dema’s station. Luckily he was there and could show us his drying tables and warehouse, and he agreed to let us return later in the evening around 9pm to see the pulping process in full swing. A brief rainfall had us temporarily worried the roads would be too muddy to make it, but when we got back 10 000 kgs of cherry had just been emptied into the collection tank and pulping had begun. Asafa estimated that it would take them 3 hours to empty the tank, so everyone should be going home just after midnight. (I’ll load some pics and video later on.) One of the interesting things about this station is that they recycle their water, and being walked through the system in the dark I had a good chat with Asafa about the challenges and skills involved in milling coffee. The job is only there for 3 months of the year, the rest of the year he has to find other work. He said it was a tough 3 months, but also the best 3 months of the year for him. He’s been doing it for 30 years, and reckons it takes 10 of them just to learn how to judge by eye, smell and feel the correct level of humidity at which to stop the parchment drying process. I believe him.
THURSDAY
Low morning sun bathed houses and people in a warm glow as we set off to the ECX main office warehouse in Awasa. A 3 year old facility, due to the late harvest they’ve only been up and running for a week this season, and they’re still only grading and cupping the remaining sun drieds from the last crop. Yihenew Tsegaye the warehouse supervisor was on hand to show us around and patiently answered all questions, happy to explain some of the benefits of the new trading platform. One of the positives he pointed out was that now that there are regional warehouses (Awasa, Dilla and Sodo in the south, and a total of 16 across the whole country) rather than just the Addis ones, suppliers have shorter distances to travel and less expenses to deliver their coffee. Now they can make the drop off in a day or two, rather than spending perhaps 2 weeks on the roundtrip to Addis.
The Awasa office has a supply zone of a 250 km radius and deals with Sidama almost exclusively. While the Dilla warehouse is only 90 km away they exclusively deal with Yirga Cheffe coffees. Awasa also occasionally get Harar D coffees from West Arsi. I didn’t know there was a Harar D, but this is apparently one of the Bali varietal. (Photo soon) Chatting to Q graders Elsabeth, Frahiwet and Balkew who were were on hand to show us the process in the lab, we bonded over our love for the Sidamo Naturals we got to cup, but agreed that at this point in the year they were Q3’s at best.
Yihenew walked us through the many steps in the process that happen at the warehouse, beginning with trucks arriving with bags from the akrabis. They arrive with a spec sheet of what’s on the truck – already controlled by the Ministry of Agriculture in Wareda who pre-sample the coffee that the akrabis plan to send to the EXC. The sheet details the coffee and the truck it’s coming in on, even down to the number of seals on the wires holding the tarpaulin covering the coffee in place. No tampering allowed here! When the truck pulls up all seals are checked and the middle row of 3 rows of bags on the truck is briefly unloaded so the sample collector can access all 30 bags. He’ll pull 100 g from each bag creating a lot sample of 3 kg. This is passed on to the coder, who number the lot and has the computer generate another random code for it, as well as pick at random the three Q graders from the staff who will cup and grade the lot.
They get the sample with no knowledge of what it is or where it’s from, and proceed to homogenize it before checking the moisture level three times to get the average. 11.5 % or less is accepted, any higher and the akrabi will be advised to dry it a bit more before coming back. Then the sample is passed over the screen sizers, indicating the percentage of beans in the sample under the exportable size of 14. The defect count is performed according to the SCAA standards before the greens go to the sample roaster who takes it just past 1 crack giving a light roasted sample to taste. Once rested for 8-24 hours, the samples are cupped using 250 ml bowls with 13.75 g coffee in each bowl. Balkew took us through the ECX cupping sheets used to grade washed coffees and natural coffees. If in this first cupping a coffee scores well enough on their scale to be considered for a grade Q1 (100-91), Q2 (90-81) or Q3 (80-71) it will be re-cupped after 8 hours using adapted SCAA sheets, to double check that the coffees awarded the Specialty status of Q1 and Q2 really are up to scratch. Sometimes the samples can cup worse and be downgraded which could of course frustrating for the akrabis, like Mr. Dakola and Emnete who I spoke to yesterday.
Based on the grading and cupping, a slip is filled in with the final results, one copy of which the akrabi receives. This feedback loop allows for a conversation about what can be done to improve the results for future lots. Whether the coffee rates specialty or commodity, this slip is also the only thing the exporters have to base their purchase at the ECX on, as they do not get to cup the samples themselves. Understandably this can be frustrating, but the ECX’s stance is that their Q graders are fully qualified to give an accurate written portrayal of the coffee, removing the need for further cupping by potential buyers.
The next step is for the slip to passed back to the coder who produces a Coffee Quality Result Sheet linking the results with the correct truck, and the supplier has to sign off on the grading of his coffee. The lot is then weighed twice on different trucks to confirm total weight, and a sheet of Goods Receiving Notes is made which both the supplier and the warehouses sign off on. All info is then sent back to Yinehew in the main office for approval and forwarding to the auction house in Addis. There, the lot will usually be sold within a couple of days, but if it doesn’t the akrabis can keep their coffee in the warehouses for up to a month before they have to start paying rental fees on the storage space. Exporters who wish to buy have to deposit a lump sum of money into the EXC accounts before they can bid, so that upon sale confirmed the money can immediately be wired to the akrabis. It can now take only 3-4 days from the time they drop off their coffee till it’s sold and they have their payment in the bank.
Within 10 days of purchase the coffee then has to be collected by the exporters, who now are the ones footing the bill for shipping the coffee to their facilities from the EXC warehouses around Ethiopia. With a truck and purchase notice form Addis in hand they go to collect from places like Awasa, who within a 1km radius have 8 warehoused capable of storing 25 000 bags each.
While a system with many good sides, one of the criticisms of the EXC is that it’s not a system that benefits international buyers who wish to deal in specialty instead of commodity coffee, and are unable to go outside the ECX direct to a co-op. While the warehouses obviously can accurately trace all their coffees back to a truck and a washing station, this info is not passed on through the system. For example, the exporters will only be told that a coffee is a Sidamo A or Sidamo B, indicating a vague western or eastern location within Sidamo, but a Sidamo B could in fact be traced back to one of its quite specific administrative areas like Amaro, Aleta Wondo or Dara. But as specialty is such a small part of the total coffee export, the ECX have decided, at least at this stage, not to accommodate the communication of this intel. I hope it will change one day, or that we find some other way of encouraging and celebrating the uniqueness of the coffees from small villages in Ethiopia, even if they are traded on the Exchange. Tomorrow, I’ll hopefully go to see just how that trading works, since I’m obviously back in Addis now and able to post this ridiculously long post!
Night y’all!