Ethiopian Coffee Then and Now: Has More Detail Meant Better Flavour?
You really do have to be careful with your palate. Once it’s calibrated to a certain level, it rarely settles back down again. To make matters worse, memory tends to gild the flavours of the past, so what we ate or drank years ago often gets remembered as better than it actually was.
I’ve worked in the coffee industry for more than 13 years now. In that time I’ve roasted and tasted more coffees than I could ever count. Most of them have blurred together, but a few stand out clearly enough to write about. Today I want to talk about Ethiopian coffee.
How Ethiopian Coffee Labelling Used to Work
Ethiopian coffee wasn’t nearly as finely categorised as it is today. What came in was labelled with a simple grade and one of just two processing methods.
In terms of naming, it went like this: first the country, Ethiopia; then the region, Yirgacheffe; then the grade, G1; and finally the processing method, washed. Four elements, and that was it.
How Ethiopian Coffee Labelling Works Today
Things look very different now. The country name stays the same, obviously, but the regional detail has multiplied. After the broad designation of Yirgacheffe comes a smaller sub-region such as Uraga.
Often the name of the washing station gets added on top of that. After that might come the name of the exporter handling the coffee, or the name of the farmer who grew and processed it. Only then do the grade and processing method get tacked on at the end.
Processing methods themselves have exploded from just two or three options in the past to what feels like hundreds today, if not more.
Has All This Extra Detail Actually Improved the Coffee?
Has Ethiopian coffee actually got better as it’s gone from that old simplicity to today’s dizzying complexity? In my experience, no.
If anything, I feel the regional character is getting blurred, and the price has climbed far faster than the flavour has improved. It would be wonderful if quality rose in step with every extra line of information on the bag. Unfortunately, that’s not the reality.
These days I often find myself missing the classic washed or natural Ethiopian coffees of the past. Even weighing the very best of each era against the other, it’s hard to say confidently that today’s coffee comes out ahead. To get a genuinely excellent Ethiopian coffee now, you have to pay a price that makes your eyes water.
And even then, what you get is only roughly on par with — or maybe a touch better than — the good Ethiopian coffee of years ago. I don’t particularly want to romanticise the past, and it’s not really my style, but I do find myself thinking about the old Ethiopian coffees more often than I’d expect.
Why Prices Keep Climbing
Some of this quality gap is almost certainly down to environmental change. As temperatures rise and soil quality weakens, growers have to move to higher-altitude land to keep producing good Ethiopian coffee.
The trouble is, the higher you go, the less farmable land there is — the available area shrinks exponentially with altitude. That naturally pushes prices up. All of these factors feed into each other, forming a loop that drives prices ever higher.
Putting It to the Test: A Recent Ethiopian Coffee Comparison
I recently tested a batch of Ethiopian coffees imported by several different companies. The lineup included coffees carrying an individual producer’s name, with prices ranging from the low twenty-thousands of won up to around forty thousand.
After finishing the tests, the coffee I ended up choosing to use was a Uraga at a price in the low-to-mid twenty-thousands. The producer-named coffee, from Muleta Muntasha, turned out to be less impressive than I’d expected given the price.
I keep learning the same lesson: an expensive coffee is no guarantee of great flavour. You shouldn’t buy a year’s worth of a coffee based on information or price alone.
Testing Should Always Be Fair and Unbiased
Every coffee deserves a fair, unbiased test. My own testing process covers the green bean’s appearance, its screen size distribution, how it behaves during roasting, its defect count, and a full flavour assessment. Not one of these steps can be skipped.