Cafés in Ethiopia Addis Ababa

Kafa, Harar and the coffee road to Arabia

Wild arabica still grows in the southwest. UNESCO designated the Kafa Biosphere Reserve in 2010: 760,144 ha about 460 km southwest of Addis Ababa, with close to 5,000 wild varieties of the plant and more than half of Ethiopia's remaining montane forest.⁵

The trade ran east. Harar, a walled hilltop city at 1,885 m, was "the emporium of the coffee trade" in Richard Burton's 1855 account, and Arthur Rimbaud returned there in 1888 to deal in coffee, musk and skins.⁶ Its old town, Harar Jugol, has been a World Heritage Site since 2006.⁶ Ethiopian coffee went to Aden through the Somali port of Berbera, and by Captain Haines's account Mocha bought up to two-thirds of its coffee from Berbera-based merchants.⁷

When the church came round to buna

For Orthodox Christians, coffee was long a Muslim drink. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church banned it some time before the 18th century, and the historian Richard Pankhurst credited the change of attitude in the late 1800s largely to Emperor Menelik, who drank it himself.⁷ Abuna Matewos, head of the church, did much to dispel the clergy's belief.⁷ Amharic sources date his approval to 1881 in the Ethiopian calendar, the year Menelik became emperor: 1889 in the Gregorian count.⁸

The bean is not the only part people drink. Among the Oromo, buna qela mixes roasted beans with butter and salt.⁷ Kuti (ቁጢ) is coffee leaves boiled with milk, and ashara (አሻራ) is brewed from the husks; neither drink has a known following outside Ethiopia.⁸

Sidama, Yirgacheffe and the growing regions

Oromia grew 59.5% of the crop over the three seasons to 2026, Southwest Ethiopia 13.7%, Sidama 12.9% and Southern Ethiopia 7.1%.¹ Sidama became a region of its own after a referendum on 20 November 2019, when 98.52% voted for more autonomy, and was formally established on 18 June 2020 with Hawassa as its capital.⁹ It supplies over 40% of the washed coffee sent to the central market.⁹

Yirgacheffe, a name buyers know from coffee bags, is a town at 1,880 to 1,919 m in the Gedeo Zone and the seat of a woreda (district) that is an important coffee-growing area.¹⁰

The exchange, the floor price and direct export

Most commercial coffee has passed through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange, set up in April 2008 to build what its founding proclamation called "an efficient modern trading system".¹¹ It handled 138,000 tonnes of all commodities in its first year, and by its third, trade was split nearly evenly between coffee and oilseeds and pulses.¹¹

The rules have loosened since. Producers may now export directly, foreign investors can export raw coffee, banks can issue export permits, and contracts no longer have to be registered at the exchange; oversight moved to the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Authority.³ A minimum export price, adjusted weekly, ties contracts to world prices.³ After the US$3 billion year, the government set a new target of US$6 billion a year within five years.⁴

Addis Ababa, where the regions meet in one cup

Coffee from all these regions ends up in the capital, from the clay jebena (coffee pot) of a home ceremony to the espresso machines of the café counters. The exchange's trading floor is in Addis Ababa, and so is East Africa's first national coffee tasting and training center.¹¹¹²