What is Ethiopian heirloom coffee? Introduction of native coffee variety heirlooms in Ethiopia

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Ethiopia

The birthplace of Arabica coffee beans

There, people still keep the tradition of harvesting wild coffee beans. The coffee garden with an elevation of more than 1500 meters has formed a unique coffee style after thousands of years of evolution and adaptation.

Ethiopian coffee, which grows in the natural wild environment, is called "wilderness coffee". It retains the most primitive and natural taste of coffee beans and has the most direct and full expression of the soil.

A variety of coffee cultivation methods can be found in Ethiopia, from wild coffee forests and semi-developed land to traditionally operated plots of land to modern plantations. About 50% of the coffee here is grown above 1500 meters above sea level.

The true meaning of the original species

The word "native species" refers to the ancient varieties of plants that were originally planted to be eaten, while some people define a variety that takes more than 100 years to be called a native species, while others say 50 years. Then some people define varieties that existed before 1945 as native species, about the time when hybrids began to emerge, or 1951, when hybrids became more widespread.

In the coffee industry, you will find that the term native species applies to varieties introduced in South America and Asia more than a hundred years ago, as well as to many coffee varieties in Africa, especially those from Ethiopia.

The most famous native species in Ethiopia are the rose summer tree species, other Java coffee species and Kaffa species, as well as various family heirloom Heirloom (excellent ancestral varieties). According to statistics, more than 2, 000 native coffee species have been recorded in Ethiopia.

Essel's coffee originated in the Kafa forest, where there is an extremely complex coffee gene pool, but because it is forest coffee, there is not much human intervention in fertilization, deliberate treatment, and is rarely recognized by the outside world. Similarly, the coffee in Ethiopia's Yegashifi, Sidamo, Harald and Lim areas is also made up of many coffee heirloom species that we do not know, but for commercial reasons and when it comes to intellectual property protection, the information of most tree species is not disclosed.

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