Ethiopian Coffee Beans Introduction to Ethiopian Coffee Growing Regions Woka Cooperative

The Rise of Single Farm Projects in Ethiopia's Yirgacheffe Region

Ethiopia's Yirgacheffe growing region has won global acclaim, but inside the Yirgacheffe system a new trend has taken hold: the development of single-farmer and single-farm productions. The Worka Cooperative is a useful example for understanding how this is playing out.

Ethiopia's Coffee Export System

Under Ethiopian regulations, there are three types of coffee export system:

1. Private processing plants that export through ECX bidding

2. Cooperative systems

3. The Single Farm Project (SFP) system

Of the three, ECX trading still accounts for the majority, with a smaller share moving through cooperatives or processing stations as direct trade. Three to four years ago, single farms were rarely seen on the market.

After encounters with small farmers from the Worka Cooperative such as Bericho, however, single farms have become steadily more visible in both the Yirgacheffe and Guji regions.

The Worka Cooperative

The cooperative system is not inherently a problem, especially for internationally renowned cooperatives like Worka, which typically turn out high-quality beans.

The Worka Cooperative was established in 2005 in a relatively remote corner of the legally defined Yirgacheffe growing region, roughly 75 kilometers from Dilla town, the local coffee trading hub. More than half of Ethiopia's coffee cultivation follows the Garden Coffee model, in which farmers grow coffee on small plots in their own backyards.

The Worka Cooperative is made up of 305 farmers with a total planting area of about 763 hectares and an annual output of nearly 460 tons. The scale is modest, but members are tightly knit and produce high-quality coffee that often lands as premium lots, and they have even obtained organic certification as a group. At its core, though, the cherries the cooperative processes still come from many member smallholders, and traceability cannot be fine-grained enough to reach back to individual producers. That leaves an awkward gap in which so-called traceable sources remain a little unclear, and now and then a few bad beans can tarnish the cooperative's reputation. The drive to extend traceability further is what led Worka to begin releasing single-farmer batches.

The Evolution of Single Farm Projects

The Single Farm Project (SFP) system has in fact always existed in Ethiopia, but its share has been small. On top of that, the market was once dominated by large commercial batches that did not prize quality, which made the single-farm model unappealing to many farm owners and kept it from growing.

With the third wave specialty coffee movement of the past two to three decades, Ethiopian coffee has risen to prominence in the market. At the same time, influential Ethiopians who had been running coffee businesses in Europe and America began returning home to work in the industry; the ECX chairman, an American SCAA professional who came back to his home country, is one such figure. The trend has planted seeds of influence across Ethiopia, nurtured by people steeped in Western coffee market culture, and it is bringing innovative change to the trade. According to coffee hunters, many local farmers have started devoting themselves to single-farm operations, and recently this has even driven a wave of Ethiopians returning from Europe and America to invest in their hometowns. Ethiopia's coffee beans are only going to get more exciting.

Brewing Recommendations

FrontStreet Coffee pour-over recommendations: V60, 90°C, a 1:15 ratio, and a 2-minute brew time.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Given the article's focus on traceability, a single-village washed lot is the best way to taste where this trend is heading. FrontStreet's Yirgacheffe Gudingding Cooperative comes from the Gudingding washing station in the Woka area at Yirgacheffe's southeastern edge, a site once part of the Worka Cooperative under the YCFCU union before it was singled out by coffee hunters around the world as a distinct single origin. It follows the most traditional washed processing, which is why it is so clean, with none of the traditional bitter edge and a naturally fresh, bright citrus-and-lemon acidity and jasmine aroma, all at a friendly price.

For anyone starting out with the Ethiopian region, FrontStreet's Washed Yirgacheffe is the classic entry point, known for white jasmine, bright citrus and lemon acidity and a tea-like character, and for its accessibility it has become many drinkers' first specialty coffee.

If you would rather see the region's fruitier side, FrontStreet's Natural Red Cherry is processed as a full red-cherry natural, meaning only fully ripe sound fruit is picked, sorted a first time at the mill, then laid on raised beds to dry in the sun and turned every 2-3 hours in the first few days to avoid uneven heat and over-fermentation. After three to five weeks of drying, the fruit is machine-scraped off, depending on weather and temperature, and the beans are moved to storage. Drying the coffee with the fruit still on gives it both classic Yirgacheffe character and the tropical fruit aroma of a natural, showing up as citrus-like acidity, a berry-juice body, honeyed sweetness and a creamy smoothness. Whatever you choose, a V60 works well: use water at 90-91°C, 15g of coffee, a 1:15 ratio and a grind around 10 on an EK43s, a caster-sugar texture with 80% passing a No. 20 sieve. FrontStreet's routine is to bloom with 30g of water for 30 seconds, then pour to 95g (about 125g on the scale), finishing that pour in roughly 1 minute; when the water level drops to two-thirds of the bed, add the remaining 100g (about 225g on the scale) and finish in about 1 minute 35 seconds, with the brew dripping through in 2 to 2 minutes 10 seconds, after which you lift the dripper and the extraction is done.