As we reported during Coffee Week in April, coffee aficionados pay top dollar for single-origin roasts.
The professional prospectors working for specialty coffee companies will travel far and wide, Marco Polo-style, to discover that next champion bean.
But to the farmers who hope to be that next great discovery, the emergence of this new coffee aristocracy is less Marco Polo, more Cinderella: How do you get your coffee bean to the ball?
Consider this tale of impoverished Ethiopian coffee growers whose beans once sold for rock bottom prices:
The yellowed highlands around the city of Jimma in Ethiopia are where coffee was discovered in the 8th century. But by the end of the 20th century its reputation had become as shaky as a car ride on its mountain roads.
Carl Cervone, a coffee agronomist for the New York-based non-profit organization Technoserve, says most of the coffee here is labeled Jimma 5, because it has all five major defects that come from poor farming.
"The types of defects that you have include overripe beans, which are called foxies, and under-ripe beans, which are called quakers," says Cervone. There are also cracked beans, and beans chewed by insects.
"But the worst of them all which is called a stinker, which means that you've basically left a bean fermenting for much longer than you should and it becomes rotten and its basically like putting a rotten egg in an omelet it kind of ruins the entire cup," he says.
Jimma 5 was so bad it became the trade term for bad coffee in Ethiopia, according to Cervone.
And yet ask one of the farmers here, Haleuya Habagaro, she'll tell you her coffee isn't just not bad, it's exquisite.
"When I roast the coffee people come to ask where that strong fruity smell is coming from," says Habagaro. "It's like when you hold an orange."
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