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What Ethiopian heirloom coffee means
Ethiopian heirloom coffee is a mix of local landraces and research selections that are rarely named. Where the label comes from and what it tells you.
When a bag of Ethiopian coffee says "heirloom," it means the beans came from a mix of local coffee trees that nobody has sorted and named one by one. Some are old landraces that farmers have grown from their own seed for generations. Some are selections released by Ethiopia's coffee research centers. The word is shorthand for "many kinds, mostly unidentified," and in Ethiopia that is usually the truth.
Why Ethiopia has so many kinds of coffee
Arabica coffee comes from here. World Coffee Research calls Ethiopia the birthplace of Coffea arabica, and Tadesse Benti of the Jimma Agricultural Research Center places its center of genetic diversity in the highlands of the southwest. Coffee still grows wild in Ethiopian forests, half wild in managed forest, and in small gardens beside houses, often under shade trees.
For centuries farmers planted seedlings from their own trees and their neighbors' trees, so each district built up its own mix. The Jimma center's field gene bank alone holds 6,721 coffee accessions, according to a 2017 review of Ethiopian coffee breeding by Tadesse Benti.
Compare that with Latin America. Most of its coffee descends from two narrow lines, Typica and Bourbon, each grown from a handful of seeds that left Ethiopia by way of Yemen, as World Coffee Research traces in its variety catalog. Our posts on Typica and on Bourbon and Caturra follow those journeys.
Landraces and research selections
Two kinds of trees end up under the heirloom label.
The first are local landraces, the types farmers have kept and selected for generations. They carry local names, often borrowed from native trees that are not coffee at all. Melbourne Coffee Merchants, a green coffee importer, lists six common in Sidama and the neighboring zones of Gedeo and Guji: Bedessa, Dega, Kurume, Mique, Sawe, Wolisho. Kurume, for example, bears smaller cherries than Wolisho.
The second are selections from Ethiopia's research program, and their story starts with a disease. Coffee berry disease, a fungus that rots green cherries on the branch, reached Ethiopia in the 1970s. The Jimma center answered with a crash program in 1972 and 1973. According to Tadesse Benti, it found 696 mother trees with less than 5 percent infection, tested their offspring, and released 13 resistant varieties between 1978 and 1981. Codes such as 74110 and 74112 come from that work. Ally Coffee, an importer, traces 74110 to a mother tree in Bishari village, in Metu, Illubabor, and 74112 to the Metu Bishari forest. Both were released in 1979, and the 74 marks the year they were cataloged and selected, 1974.
The work kept going. Since 1994 Ethiopia has also bred varieties from each region's own landraces, so that a Sidama selection keeps the character of Sidama coffee. In 2010, 11 of those local landrace varieties were released for Hararge and Wollega, and for Sidama and Yirgacheffe. The Awada research center near Yirgalem, at 1,740 meters, handles the south. Mesfin Kebede Gessese, in a 2020 summary of the center's work, lists Angefa, released in 2006, and Odicha, Fayate and Koti, released in 2010, as its selections for Sidama and Gedeo. World Coffee Research now counts 42 varieties released by the Jimma center.
Why the trees are hard to name
Most Ethiopian coffee is grown by smallholders. World Coffee Research puts their share at 86 percent, from a 2018 study by Enveritas. A smallholder family sells its cherries to a nearby washing station, where they go into the same tanks and onto the same drying beds as everyone else's that day. A single lot can hold landraces, older Jimma selections and newer regional ones all at once.
The trees also look alike. Many can only be told apart with a DNA test, and DNA testing is rarely done at the scale of a garden plot. A 2019 Perfect Daily Grind article, drawing on Getu Bekele, then at Counter Culture Coffee, explains that buyers who could not identify what they were buying simply called it all heirloom. It also points out that a variety planted in Hararge and in Yirgacheffe will not adapt the same way, so a name alone would not tell you how a coffee tastes.
Ethiopian landraces also turn up far from home under other names. Geisha was collected from Ethiopian coffee forests in the 1930s, according to World Coffee Research, and reached Panama by way of Tanzania and Costa Rica. Our post on Geisha coffee follows it. Pink Bourbon, grown in Colombia, has tested as an Ethiopian landrace too.
What the label tells you
"Heirloom" tells you the coffee was grown in Ethiopia from local stock and is probably a mix. On its own it says nothing about quality. The place, the altitude and the process on the bag tell you more. A natural from high in Sidama and a washed coffee from the lower slopes of the southwest can both say heirloom and taste nothing alike.
Some roasters now write "Ethiopian landraces" instead, and a few list JARC numbers when a washing station knows which trees went into a lot. If a bag names 74110 or Kurume, someone traced it. If it says heirloom, nobody traced it tree by tree, and in Ethiopia that is normal.
Our Ethiopia as the example
Our light roast from Sidama says Ethiopian heirloom on the bag. Elena Mireles leases a few hectares near Bensa, in Sidama, at 2,050 meters, and farms them with the neighboring families who taught her. When she first came, in 2003, she worked among heirloom varieties nobody had bothered to name, and like most coffee from the area, ours is still described by place and process rather than by tree.
It is a natural, dried whole in the cherry on raised beds, with hints of blueberry, jasmine, peach. Our guide to Sidama coffee covers the region those trees grow in.
