Foreign Coffee Brand Recommendations - How Good is Ethiopia's TOMOCA Coffee?

The Legendary TOMOCA Coffee

When it comes to coffee, Ethiopia cannot be overlooked, and when the conversation turns to Ethiopian coffee, TOMOCA must be mentioned.

Fresh TOMOCA coffee beans, roasted beans, and Harar longberry are roasted to order.

Anyone who has tasted TOMOCA coffee knows it is the real thing. TOMOCA is also a century-old brand in Ethiopia. If you ask where to find the best coffee in Ethiopia, the answer is always TOMOCA.

TOMOCA Coffee Product Information

TOMOCA coffee beans or ground coffee

Product Name: TO.MO.CA Coffee Beans or Powder

Origin: Ethiopia

Ingredients: Harar coffee beans (roasted)

Roast Level: City Roast

Taste Profile: Slightly sweet with a gentle fruit acidity, and excellent sweetness carried by its characteristic mellow flavor. Its distinctive sweetness, acidity, and bitterness are extremely elegant.

Aroma: Rich fruit aroma and a grassy fragrance

Appearance: Smaller bean particles with uneven color

Brewing Method:

The brewing method for TOMOCA coffee beans is not covered here, since it requires a coffee machine.

For TOMOCA coffee powder, note that this is not an instant product. Coffee machines, moka pots, distillation pots, siphon pots, and filter paper can all be used to enjoy its rich flavor. For those without that professional equipment, a small pot for boiling milk or water is enough. Once the water boils, add the coffee powder and continue boiling for 10-20 minutes; generally use 2 cups of water for 1-2 spoons of coffee powder, with the spoon being coffee-spoon sized or a regular small dining spoon. The brewed coffee then needs to be filtered through a fine sieve or filter paper two to three times. After that, enjoy it according to your taste. If you are not used to drinking coffee black, add milk, condensed milk, brown sugar, granulated sugar, or coffee mate. Without sugar it will be very bitter. This should be a favorite for coffee lovers.

How to Identify Fresh Coffee Beans

Smell: fresh coffee beans give off a rich aroma when sniffed, while stale beans smell off.

Sight: good coffee beans are complete in shape and full in size, while poor ones are incomplete and irregular.

Touch: fresh beans are crisp when pressed and release fragrance when they crack.

Color: dark, blackish coffee beans produce a bitter cup, while yellowish coffee beans produce an acidic one.

The Origin of Ethiopian Coffee

Ethiopia is known as the birthplace of coffee, and its history and traditional farming methods make it worthy of that title. The English word "coffee" is said to come from the Ethiopian place name "Kaffa." Legend has it that around 900 AD a shepherd in Ethiopia's Kaffa region noticed his flock competing to eat a kind of red berry. After eating them the sheep became unusually lively and behaved strangely. The shepherd, worried they had eaten something harmful, stayed anxious all night, but the next day the flock was unharmed. That accidental discovery led him to gather the wild fruit and boil it for juice to quench his thirst. He found the juice extraordinarily fragrant and felt unusually energized after drinking it, so he began cultivating the plant, which grew into large-scale coffee farming. The name "coffee" evolved from "Kaffa," and from Ethiopia, coffee spread to the rest of the world.

Ethiopian coffee should be the world's only pollution-free green organic coffee. Even today Ethiopia still relies on traditional cultivation, with the trees cared for by hand. Fertilizer consists mainly of fallen leaves, dead grass, and animal manure, replacing the harmful pesticides and herbicides used on a large scale in other coffee-producing countries.

Ethiopia is now most famous for producing "Mocha" coffee. In the West, "Mocha" refers not only to a coffee variety but also to methods of brewing coffee, to brewing equipment, and to special preparation techniques. Mocha coffee beans are mostly dry-processed, though premium washed beans also exist. Mocha beans are known for their acidity, and they also carry a slight sweetness, a subtle wine aroma, and a low caffeine content.

The Legendary TOMOCA Coffee Shop

The shop is very small, extremely small, and yet world-renowned. Lonely Planet once featured it, and many coffee enthusiasts from around the world make a special pilgrimage here just to enjoy a cup.

The TOMOCA coffee shop sits in a very inconspicuous small building, the yellow one in the photo below. Without a guide who knows the way, you would never find it, and even standing in front of it you would not believe it. Yet take a taxi or ask for directions in Addis Ababa, and everyone knows it. There are no branches anywhere in the world, only this one.

We visited on a weekend and possibly ran into a tour group, because it was extremely busy inside. On the left was a line of people waiting to pay. As you can see from the tables on the right, there are only three such tables in the whole shop, and no chairs. Everyone stands while drinking, and they drink quickly, too.

Here is one more photo, of an Ethiopian coffee map hanging indoors. There is something special about it that I will look into next time. Before leaving, I bought coffee powder that needs to be brewed for 3-5 minutes. There was no instant coffee. They also sell coffee beans. I had meant to give the coffee powder to colleagues, but then it occurred to me that none of them own a coffee pot, so I kept it for myself.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Ethiopia is where the story of coffee begins, and FrontStreet Coffee's lineup is organized around the two processing methods that define the country. The Yirgacheffe Gedeb Cooperative is the cleanest introduction. Smallholders in Gedeb village send their cherries to a shared washing station, and the washed process keeps the cup precise: jasmine and bright citrus acidity first, then green tea and honey once the coffee is roasted medium-light. It is a natural first stop for anyone exploring washed Ethiopian coffee, and it holds up in a pour-over, a cold brew, or an espresso.

For the other side of the country's character, the Red Cherry Plan Yirgacheffe is a natural process lot, dried in the sun for two weeks until the fruit sugars settle into the bean and the moisture content falls to 12%. The result is a cup of peach, cocoa, honey, and lemon. The Huakui takes natural processing further still. Grown in the Hambella area of Guji, Sidamo, on a farm of 200 hectares, the cherries are dried on raised beds for 21 days and turned constantly, with defective beans hand-sorted every three to five days. After a medium-light roast it shows a light fermented wine aroma, florals, citrus, and mango, with honey sweetness, a cocoa edge, a thick body, and a long finish. Two other Ethiopian lots round out the range: the Hamasho 74158, a JARC-derived variety with strawberry, star fruit, and green grape sweetness, and the Kafa Forest coffee, grown between 1400 and 2100 meters in a UNESCO biosphere reserve, with white florals, bright lemon acidity, sweet orange, and bergamot.