Sidama coffee: a guide to Ethiopia's south

Sidama coffee comes from the Sidama Region of southern Ethiopia, in the highlands east of the Rift Valley lakes around the city of Hawassa. Almost all of it is grown by smallholders in garden plots between about 1,500 and 2,200 meters, and it is sold two ways: washed, which tastes clean, floral and lemony, and natural, which tastes of berries and stone fruit. Sidamo is the same coffee under its older name.

Where Sidama is

Hawassa, the regional capital, sits on the shore of Lake Hawassa, a few hours' drive south of Addis Ababa. The land climbs east and southeast from the lake into green, crowded hills, and that is coffee country. Bensa, one of the highest coffee districts, lies southeast of Hawassa.

Sidama became a region of its own recently. In a referendum in November 2019, over 98 percent of voters chose to leave the Southern Nations region, and the Sidama Region was formed in June 2020 as Ethiopia's tenth regional state. USDA's office in Addis Ababa, citing Ethiopia's Coffee and Tea Authority, puts Sidama at about 13 percent of the country's coffee in 2024/25, level with the South West Ethiopia region and far behind Oromia, at about 59 percent.

Sidama or Sidamo?

Sidama is the name of the people, their language and now the region. Sidamo was the name of the old province, and the coffee trade kept it. Ethiopia's Intellectual Property Office later registered "Sidamo" as a trademark, along with Harrar and Yirgacheffe, in the United States and other markets, according to WIPO. So a bag may say either. They mean the same place.

Garden coffee from small farms

Most Ethiopian coffee does not come from plantations. A 2021 report by the International Institute for Environment and Development counts 5.3 million smallholders producing 95 percent of the country's coffee, and estimates that garden coffee makes up about half of all production, semi forest coffee about 35 percent and forest coffee about 10 percent.

In Sidama the garden is literal. Coffee grows around the house among enset, the false banana that is a staple food in the south, with fruit trees and vegetables in the gaps and taller trees for shade. When Elena Mireles first came to Sidama in 2003, it was families like these who taught her, and she still farms a few leased hectares near Bensa, at 2,050 meters, alongside the neighbors who showed her how.

Washing stations: washed or natural

Few garden farms have a mill of their own. Where there is one nearby, families sell ripe red cherries on the day they pick them to a washing station, owned by a cooperative or a private processor, that buys from the farms around it. Where there is not, they dry the cherries at home. A 2018 study by Tamru and Minten, cited in the same IIED report, found that 66 percent of Ethiopia's coffee farming communities had no access to a wet mill. The better lots are sold under the name of their station or village.

The station does one of two things with the cherries.

1. For a washed coffee, it pulps the cherries, ferments the seeds in tanks until the sticky fruit layer lets go, washes them in channels and dries them on raised beds. The cup is clean and light, with jasmine, lemon or black tea.
2. For a natural, it dries the whole cherry in the sun on raised beds, turning it often, for two or three weeks. The seed dries inside its fruit, and the cup picks up berry, peach and a little wine.

Sidama sells a lot of both. Natural vs washed coffee explains the difference in more detail, and why Ethiopian coffee tastes like blueberry covers the natural side.

Altitude and harvest

USDA puts Ethiopia's coffee between about 1,500 and more than 2,200 meters, and Sidama's best known lots come from near the top of that range. The importer Trabocca puts the farms of the Bombe mountains, in Bensa, at around 2,000 meters. At that height, a few degrees north of the equator, the nights are cold and the cherries ripen slowly.

The harvest runs roughly from October to January, according to the importer Mercanta, which adds that southern regions such as Sidama often start earlier and higher farms finish later. After milling and resting, exports peak from April to July, USDA reports.

What Sidama coffee tastes like

Washed Sidama is usually delicate and bright: jasmine and bergamot, lemon, sometimes peach, with a body like strong tea. Natural Sidama is louder, with blueberry and strawberry, ripe stone fruit and sometimes a winey edge. Both do best at a light roast, brewed as pour over, where the fruit and flowers are not buried.

Our light roast from Ethiopia is a Sidama natural from Elena's plots near Bensa, dried whole on raised beds for up to three weeks and turned by hand every hour. It has hints of blueberry, jasmine, peach. Aurelio tasted it once, in 2006, and wrote in his notebook: "this one I do not understand, and I like it very much."