032 - Niguse Kayimo

This coffee is exclusively available to Aviary full season subscribers and will be roasted the week of November 1, 2026.

The eleventh coffee of our 2026 season comes from Bensa, Ethiopia through a collaboration between Christopher Feran and CoQua—a single-producer fermented honey 74158 presenting vibrant and tropical with juicy, tangy notes of peach, mango and mandarin orange.

From Christopher: "Last year, early in the Ethiopian harvest, I had a call with Moata Raya of CoQua. We reflected on the successes of our work together during my three years sourcing coffee in Ethiopia with Crop to Cup Coffee Importers and admired the growth of the producers we'd supported. We'd worked to build market access for lesser-known and under-represented coffee producers with a particular focus on smallholders, who produce the majority of the country's coffee yet receive the least value from premiums paid at export. As part of that work, we supported smallholders who obtained export licenses following the 2017 export market liberalization in an effort to improve their equity in the supply chain. By exporting directly rather than selling their coffee as cherry, producers stand to gain greater value for their harvest and increase their financial security.

"As a pilot program, we identified a group of producers with high quality potential and provided them with not only marketing support and market access but also material support in the form of shade cloth, barrels for fermentation as well as disc pulpers as well as processing guidance. These investments enabled them to produce wet-processed coffees for the first time.

"Eight years after export liberalization, it's still rare to find single-producer, smallholder wet processed coffees from Southern Ethiopia. Large-scale, privately-owned washing stations dot Sidama, Guji and Yirgacheffe and process lots using cherry collected from hundreds or thousands of farmers each; without access to smaller-scale mills, smallholder-exporters nearly exclusively produce cherry-dried naturals.

"Following the success of that first round of producers in Bensa, which included future Cup of Excellence winners Basha Bekele (AVIARY#008) and Mate Matiwos (AVIARY#007) as well as Bekele Belaychow (AVIARY#005), we expanded our interventions—providing pulpers for Shibru Dube (AVIARY#023) in Chelchele; Bekele Kachara, Bekele Yutute and Tuke Yute in Bensa; and Reshad Abababulgu in Agaro. As those producers found markets for their coffees with roasters willing to pay a premium, other producers invested in their own pulpers.

"By the end of our work together, producers who started as smallholders grew into medium- and large-scale exporters with multiple processing stations, trucks for cherry collection, and full-time employees. Nguisse Nare, who had bought his own simple one-disc pulper in 2025 opened a full-scale washing station in Bensa in 2026. Rather than thinking of themselves as producers and farmers, they thought of themselves as exporters first—if they even grew coffee anymore, at all.

"I told Moata I didn't want to lose sight of the importance of working with Ethiopian smallholder—the too-often invisible people whose work is primarily responsible for Ethiopia's infamous quality. While Ethiopia is built for scale—large scale factories and minimum milling volumes of 30 bag lots are the norm—inspired by the model of production I'd seen in Colombia, I asked Moata for his help ahead of Aviary's 2026 season to identify a smallholder with very high quality potential and invite them to produce coffee using a protocol I'd written, with the aim of paying well above the government's minimum export price for the lot. Moata would partner with them to oversee processing, and my friends at Crop to Cup would facilitate the import.

"Moata identified Niguse Kayimo as the ideal candidate. His farm, planted with 74158 at 2200 meters above sea level in Bensa, fit the profile of the successful processing work we'd done in the past. His son, newly involved in the business, saw the potential of specialty coffee for his family and would oversee the processing.

"The resulting lot, shipped via air as a result of delays stemming from the United States and Israel's war of aggression in the region, arrived in August. Before committing it to cryostorage, we cupped an arrival sample, which presented with vibrant and tropical notes of peach, mango and mandarin orange."