Quite of few of our great customers have been calling the office and asking, "Why can't I get my Ethiopia Yirgacheffe anymore?"

A recent change in Ethiopia's coffee infrastructure has clogged up the system a bit and it's been very difficult to explain to our customers. Fair Trade co-op coffee is now again starting to flow out of the country after a mass backup to all exporting while the new system was put in place.

Our good friend, Zach Dyer of the Riverfront Times, wrote a fantastic blog this week about the situation. Please read it, and then read my response below to Zach's blog.

In response to "Is Yirgacheffe a Coffee or a Brand" and the Ethiopia Coffee Exchange:

Very timely article! This is a hot topic right now - sourcing coffee is one of the most confusing and bewildering processes. To get coffee from a small farm in Ethiopia to the United States takes an immense amount of work - especially if you want that coffee to taste great.

Most of the industry is still in the function of judging quality by size, density, and uniformity. Taste is only coming into play in the specialty area.

You wrote, “This industry is no stranger to paying a little more for a good product: Fair trade, bird-friendly and organic are well-known tags on the side of coffee bags. However, the one thing that holds the system of specialty and ethical coffees together is the one thing that the ECX doesn't currently address: traceability.”

Continually, we need to remind each other that Fair Trade, Organic, Rainforest Alliance, Bird-friendly, and the like have nothing to do with “good” coffee cup quality - these are great programs that address trade prices, growing practices, and handling regulations, but they do not address taste. And as far as I know, only Organic Certification addresses true traceability. Fair Trade will track monetary exchange, but only back to the co-op, which can be made up of thousands of farmers’ coffees.

To me, I think the ECX will help by sorting most of Ethiopia's coffee into a more stable commodity, but the microlot coffees will suffer because of it. Other countries do similar sorting, like Columbia, with their Supremo and Excelso grades. Ethiopia is going a bit further with 9 grades and regions. We're still finding ways in Colombia to keep microlots separate thanks to the work of great exporters like RACAFE. It really is the middlemen - exporters, importers, support agencies, USAID, and many more - that deserve a lot of credit for allowing any of us to taste these fantastic coffees. Without them, we’d all be drinking very monotonous coffee.

I'm pretty confident that we will find a way to continue to source microlot coffee in Ethiopia - it's just going to take awhile to get the details worked out. These microlots are just a small drop in the ocean of Ethiopian Coffee, therefore they're not taking top priority. This must be completely frustrating to importers like Crop to Cup and 90 Plus who have been spending tremendous amounts of effort in Ethiopia to source some of the best coffees in the world (i.e. Beloya, Aricha, Amaro Gayo), but if the market demands them, we'll get those coffees back.