Ethiopia's Oldest Coffee Industry

It all started in Ethiopia. Here lives the myth about Kaldi's dancing goats, who were the first to discover the little red and juicy berries on the wild coffee trees. And from here, in the centuries to follow coffee spread throughout the entire world. While the Kaldi story dates back some one thousand years, Ethiopia today is still as exotic as mysterious as it was then. One can find Kaldi's goats in the streets of the capital Addis Ababa, a city bursting with a mixture of modern development and ancient human history. And dating back to the start of the Kaldi legend, this North African country has continued to produce some of the best coffee in the world and now the industry is working on making it even better. But two decades of civil strife and socialist rule under the former strongman Mengistu left infrastructure in ruins, coffee farms in bad shape and in urgent need of rehabilitation, and the industry further burdened by a heavy tax system.

Ethiopian coffee

Ethiopia produces primarily arabica coffee (some 225,000 tons) from wild trees in the provinces of Djimmah, Sidamo, Lekempti and Salo in the west and Southwest. Ethiopia is believed to be one of the two birthplaces of the coffee bean (the other more established source being Yemen). Addis Ababa, its capital is the chief interior coffee market. The primary names for Ethiopian coffee beans are Abyssinian, Djimmahand Harrar that is also known as Harar and Harari. Harrar is the most noted coffee of Ethiopia grown in plantations near the ancient capital of Harar, which is both a city and province in the country. Coffee now known as Harrar used to be sold as either long berry Mocha or
Abyssinian long berry and is usually exported through Djibouti or Aden. These coffees are described by connoisseurs as winery or fruity. The beans except for those in Sidamo are generally dry-processed. Yergacheffe is a more fragrant example of Sidamo and a wonderful stand-alone coffee. The coffee of Ethiopia, one of the countries where coffee is a native plant, faded in popularity for a while. The Harar of Ethiopia varies greatly but when it's great, it is spectacular with the sweetness and smoothness of classic Yemen Mocha.
http://www.newafrica.com