Country: Ethiopia
Region: Sidama
Process: Natural
Varietal: Landrace
Altitude: 2,000 metres above sea level
 
This superb *Landrace coffee is produced by Bekele, a third-generation farmer who has spent more than a decade cultivating coffee on his family land alongside bananas, false bananas, and avocados. While the other crops provide food for his household, coffee is the crop that sustains his livelihood.
 
Bekele’s coffee is exported by Mecota Trading, a company founded by Moata Raya to give smallholder farmers direct access to international markets. Mecota works with ten farmers across Ethiopia, supporting them through processing to help achieve specialty-grade quality.
By consolidating small microlots into export-ready volumes without losing their identity, Mecota preserves the individuality of each coffee - a rarity in a system often built on anonymity.
 
As a young company, their current aim is to gain secure financing so they can continue to pay the farmers they work with the best possible prices for their coffee. In the future, they would like to give farmers pre-financing, so that they can focus on cultivating exceptional coffees without having to worry about money.
 
As for long term goals, Mecota would like to establish their own community coffee washing and drying station in a location that’s central to all of their farmers.
 
*What are heirloom and local landrace coffee varieties?
Heirloom and local landrace are terms for native coffee varieties that developed naturally over generations within a specific region, without intentional breeding programmes. They're most closely associated with Ethiopia - the centre of origin for Coffea arabica - where an estimated six thousand to ten thousand distinct wild and semi-wild varieties exist.
 
In Ethiopian coffee, the terms are often used loosely and sometimes interchangeably. Heirloom typically refers to locally grown varieties of unidentified or mixed genetic background; landrace more specifically describes populations that have adapted to local conditions over many generations of cultivation without formal selection or characterisation.
 
For buyers, this diversity is part of what makes Ethiopian coffee so compelling and so hard to replicate. A mixed heirloom lot from a well-managed Yirgacheffe washing station carries the accumulated genetic complexity of varieties adapted to that specific altitude, soil, and climate over centuries. That's why Ethiopian coffees can produce flavour profiles that genuinely don't exist anywhere else - not because of a specific named cultivar, but because of what grows there naturally.
 
 
Many thanks to Bekele, Mecota Trading, and Omwani for allowing me to use their excellent images