Bekele Belacho

Bekele Belacho is a third generation farmer, inheriting his farm from his parents in the Kokose village in the Sidamo region. Bekele has spent over 10 years cultivating coffee on this land, alongside other crops like bananas, false bananas, and avocados.

The Sidamo region is well known for its citrusy, crisp coffees, and produces the vast majority of Ethiopia’s highest graded coffees. Ethiopia is also home to a huge range of genetically diverse coffee plants, creating a vast array of unique varieties, many of which are uncategorised. The 74158 variety of this particular coffee is one of the most common varieties in the Sidamo region, alongside 74110 and 74112.

After careful hand-sorting of harvested cherries, they have been dried on outdoor raised beds and monitored carefully for 15 - 20 days to protect the cherries from rain or intense sunlight. Once dried to satisfaction, the cherries are then hulled and sorted into grades (size), and prepared for export.

Traceability is often challenging with Ethiopian coffees, as the majority of coffees are passed through the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange, which groups coffees together by region and often results in a loss of the detailed information about who grew the coffee. Independently exporting coffee requires resources and finances that are often unavailable to smaller farmers.

It is the first year that Omwani, one of our importing partners, have brought coffees from Ethiopia to their UK offer list, with the help of Mecota Trading. Both teams have worked to develop long-term relationships with producers in Ethiopia to ensure that the chain of information and farmer details are kept with the coffee that they’ve purchased, ensuring full traceability along the entire supply chain, and navigating the bureaucratic difficulties of exporting from Ethiopia.