Buncho Washing Station: 940 smallholders

Asefa Dukamo's parents grew coffee and garden crops, so he was around it early. By his teens he was buying cherry from relatives and neighbours, adding his own family's harvest, and delivering the lot to whichever washing station would take it. The problem was that no washing station was anywhere near. He spent a lot of his youth moving other people's coffee a very long way.

Eventually he did the obvious thing and built one closer.

How that turned into twenty washing stations

The first one went up in 1997, in Girja village, less than a mile from his parents' house. The next year brought a second, in Eltama, 30 kilometres away. Then he moved to Daye town in the Bensa district and set up the mother station, Qonqana, later adding a dry mill so naturally processed coffees had somewhere to go.

His younger brother Mulugeta Dukamo co-founded Daye Bensa Coffee, the exporter, and did much of the work of expanding it. Between them the family now runs 20 washing stations, five mills and three coffee farms across six woredas: Bensa, Bura, Chabe, Hoko (Girja), Aroressa and Chire.

Buncho, up in Shantawene, is one of those stations.

The 940 people behind it

Roughly 940 smallholders deliver cherry to Buncho. Average plot size is under five hectares, and in practice most are considerably smaller than that.

They don't only grow coffee. Sugarcane goes in, along with various fruits and enset, the indigenous plant that gets prepared as food in several forms and is a staple across this part of Ethiopia. Coffee income matters, but on plots this size it's never going to be the whole household budget.

One consequence of that is worth stating plainly. Almost all the coffee grown here is effectively organic, because fertiliser, pesticide and herbicide all cost money that nobody has. It isn't certified, because certification also costs money. So you get the practice without the logo, which is the opposite of how this usually goes.

What makes it hard

Producers around Buncho work without reliable electricity, water, telecommunications or road access. On top of that, there's simply less agricultural knowledge circulating than there would be somewhere better connected, and that shows up directly in yield and quality.

Daye Bensa runs a programme called "Back to the Community" against exactly this. So far it has built roads linking villages, installed electricity transformers, and put on training in growing practice. The stated plans for the coming years include more training and a health facility for producers and their families.

The useful thing about the Dukamo family being this large in the region is reach. Twenty stations is a lot of farms, and a lot of young people learning how coffee production actually works.

How the coffee is made

Only the ripest cherries get picked, by hand, selectively.

At the mill the cherries go into tanks of water and anything that floats is pulled out, which sorts by density and catches most of the underripe and damaged fruit in one move. What sinks gets de-pulped in a Panagos machine, then goes into fermentation tanks for 24 hours.

After fermentation the coffee is run through washing channels and pushed along with wooden tools, which is how the last of the mucilage comes off. Then it goes onto traditional raised beds lined with mesh, where it sits for roughly 12 to 15 days depending on temperature and humidity, turned every 30 minutes.

Once it's dry, producers travel two to five kilometres to the dry mill, by horseback or motorcycle, where the coffee is hulled by machine.

The station also cleans its used processing water by natural means before releasing it, and the pulp left over from de-pulping goes back onto the farms as fertiliser. Neither is dramatic. Both are the difference between a mill that's a good neighbour and one that isn't.

Sidama, and why it isn't spelled Sidamo

You'll still see "Sidamo" on plenty of bags and menus. It's out of date.

Sidama sits in southern Ethiopia and is home to close to 3.2 million people with their own language, culture and traditions. After a referendum in June 2020 it officially became a regional state, and Sidama became the correct name. The coffee trade has been slower to catch up than the map has.

The region has fertile soil, serious altitude and a climate that suits coffee about as well as anywhere does, which is why the name got famous in the first place.

A note on Ethiopian traceability

For a long stretch, most Ethiopian coffee could not be traced past the region it came from.

From 2008, exports were centralised through the Ethiopia Commodity Exchange. Coffee was cupped and graded at certified labs, then marked generically. The intention was fair: producers would get paid on quality rather than on the reputation of a name. The side effect was that nobody downstream could tell you which washing station a coffee came from.

That changed at the end of March 2017, when a bill from the Ethiopian Coffee and Tea Development and Marketing Authority allowed Ethiopian coffee to be sold with its traceability intact, including coffee still moving through the exchange. Licensed exporters can now sell directly to buyers, with a catch: parchment has to sell within three days of reaching the processing plant in Addis, and if it doesn't, it goes through the exchange anyway, though now with its origin information attached.

Which is the short answer to why a bag can say "Buncho Station, Shantawene" at all.