Ethiopian Coffee Al Naturale

All coffee growing countries in Africa produce dry milled, or naturally processed, coffee. But for a long time, even before the emergence of the specialty coffee industry, Ethiopia and naturally processed coffee have been virtually synonymous. Why? Well, like all African coffee history, Ethiopian coffee history includes Europeans; except that, in the case of Ethiopia, the story is about the lack of Europeans, which means more naturally processed coffee relative to other countries. Yes, an explanation is in order.

In 1935, Mussolini decided the word “Empire” would look real spiffy after the word Italian. Italy had come up short in the European “Scramble for Africa” at the end of the nineteenth century, but they did hold territory north and southeast of Ethiopia. If they could acquire Ethiopia, the only remaining truly independent country on the continent (one is hesitant to count Liberia, but that is a story for another time), Italy would have possession of most of east Africa.

And that’s what they named it: Italian East Africa. But Ethiopia would not be taken easily, despite being massively outgunned by Italy. The Italians brought 390 aircraft to the fight. Ethiopia had 13 old biplanes and four pilots. Nevertheless, it took Italy nearly two years of hard fighting, including several lost battles, before they could declare the country pacified, and even then Guerilla action and periodic revolts continued for the entire occupation. Some of the last significant Guerilla fighting took place near Lake Tana, where coffee still grows wild and has since, well, time immemorial. The lake has also been home to many monasteries since time nearly-immemorial, making the region a good candidate as the setting for the story of Kaldi, whether it’s a true story or not.

The Italians didn’t last more than six years as occupiers, and in the spring of 1941 they quit Ethiopia to focus on conflicts more northerly. The Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, returned to power from exile. Although there were continuing pockets of Italian resistance, by the time the Allies invaded Sicily in 1943, Ethiopians had regained complete control of their own country. As brief as it was, the occupation extracted a heavy price. Because the Ethiopians never truly surrendered, there were brutal reprisals to resistance and perhaps more than a quarter of a million people died during the invasion.

Italy hoped to bring an initial wave of half a million colonists to Ethiopia and made rapid improvements to infrastructure in preparation. Although the occupation never evolved into colonization, the Italians left dams, roads, and railways in their wake. However, with the exception of cotton, most of the improvements were focused on urban industrialization. Coffee lands were practically ignored because Ethiopian freedom fighters remained active in, if not in control of, highland regions. Other than ancillary benefits from roads and railways, almost no direct improvements were made to coffee production, such as the introduction of wet coffee mill mechanization.

In other African coffee producing countries, colonization left behind a larger industrialization footprint, including the introduction of wet mill technology in many of the coffee producing regions. Prior to the Italian invasion, the handful of washing stations in Ethiopia were owned by Europeans with large cultivated farms near the town of Harrar. The Italians left the coffee industry as they found it, but it was the cultivated farms in Harrar, producing a washed coffee that the trade used to refer to as the “Mocha Longberry,” that benefited most from improved infrastructure.

In the highlands and the southwest, vast forests of coffee grew wild, with almost no formal cultivation whatsoever until mid-century, and even then this amounted to only to a few areas where the coffee plants were thinned, some of the shade was cut back, and some of the undergrowth was removed. Harvest was still initiated by the coffee trees giving up their fruit. Coffee cherries were allowed to dry on the branch and eventually fall to the ground where they were gathered rather than picked, and then hand milled using a large mortar and pestle. For a long time, this was not a “natural” process or “dry” process. This was the only process.

Gradually, the wild coffee was trained if not tamed. Picking replaced gathering, which improved efficiency but not quality because trees would be stripped of cherries regardless of ripeness. Drying on the ground replaced drying on the tree. Quality was arbitrary at best and often poor. Even today, in market statistics, commercial grade naturals are lumped together with Robusta as blenders.

It’s important to remember that natural processed coffee is rarely a choice among options. Given the cost of wet milling and/or lack of access for many small-holder coffee farmers, it is almost always the only option. More than 70% of Ethiopian coffee farmers sun-dry their coffee but half of them say they would wet mill if they could. That number grows as more of the 1 million small-scale farmers learn the market value washed coffee and the number of washing stations increases, two likely outcomes of recent reforms within the Ethiopian coffee industry.  

But even 20 years ago, not all naturals were of poor quality all the time, or at least, some naturals were sometimes interesting in a way that made quality a question that was less interesting. As the specialty coffee retail industry grew—the number of coffeehouses doubling every two years for most of the 90’s—the number of coffee roasters grew. As the number of coffee roasters grew, the number of green coffee buyers searching for something “different” grew. Twenty-five years ago, searching for something different as a green coffee buyer meant requesting more samples from your broker and, eventually, green buyers encountered naturally processed coffees that they felt could stand alone, apart from a blend.

There was back then, and still is to some extent, controversy over whether or not naturals tasted good or just different. Specialty coffee had defined itself by differentiating factors within the realm of a “clean cup,” a cupping term that refers to the absence of attributes usually associated with defects. In effect, specialty coffees and their roasters compete in the arena of differentiation that occurs after the standard of clean cup is established. Naturals, as they first entered the specialty market, seemed to be arguing that something shy of clean cup could still be good if it was interesting enough, or fruity enough, or made customers say it was like nothing they had ever tasted before.

Slowly, quality began to catch up to “interesting.” Drying coffee on the ground gave way to drying on raised beds, which gave producers more control over the effects of moisture. Producers learned how to grade their coffee and remove defects. Drying times became more precise. Natural coffees began to approach the intersection of clean and interesting. Perhaps the best indicator that naturals had arrived as players in the specialty market was producers with access to washing stations deciding to intentionally process some coffee naturally as a choice rather than a necessity, chasing the wild fruit and the clean cup at the same time.

The Ethiopian naturals available from Covoya this month are the result of intention. These coffees taste great because the coffee producers intended them to taste great, and worked hard to make it happen. Unlike the early days of specialty naturals, there is not one happy accident among them.