Kiss the Hippo Coffee - Ethiopia, Guji Buki

Tasting Notes: Lemon, Raspberry, Floral.
Recommended for espresso and filters.

Eleven hours of driving west from Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa will take you to one of the country’s great coffee regions, Guji. Not far from the border with South Sudan, Guji is known for coffees with vibrant, complex, and massively sweet flavours. Ethiopia is where coffee originated, so it’s no surprise that the country is known for some of the world’s best. Travelling to places like Guji, you’ll even see coffee growing wild through the cracks in the concrete. Such a hospitable place for coffee creates incredible lots – like this one, from the Buki Washing Station.

Most coffee from Ethiopia is the work of whole communities. The farms are quite small with usually only a hectare or so to grow on. Alongside the coffee, most food for the farmer’s family is produced on the same farm. Farmers bring the picked cherries to the market and choose to sell them either to co-ops or to private washing stations. The prices that the mills will sell the coffee for once it gets to the export market in the capital are even broadcasted over the radio – the producers hear this price, so all the buyers compete to buy the best cherries from the farmers. This means that many stations share producers with each other, so great coffee is reflective of a great region of coffee farmers