The Long Drive to Guji

There is a moment, somewhere past the eighth hour on the road to Guji, when the tarmac gives up entirely and the world turns the colour of rust. The truck slows. The dust settles on the windscreen like a fine sediment. And then the hills appear — terraced, impossibly green, stitched with coffee.

We could buy this coffee over email. Most do. A broker sends a sample, a price is agreed, a container moves three months later, and nobody who works for the company that sells you the bag has ever stood on the land that grew it. It is efficient, and it is how the overwhelming majority of specialty coffee changes hands. We have simply never been able to bring ourselves to do it that way.

Why we still go

Obsession over sourcing is meaningless if you never see the source. So twice a year we make the drive — three flights into Addis Ababa, a night in Bole that never quite counts as sleep, and then the long road south through Shashamene and Hawassa, where the highway narrows and the trucks slow for goats, then for nothing, then for the simple reason that the road itself has run out of patience. The last hours are the ones that matter. You cannot rush them, and we have stopped trying.

We go because a cupping table in London cannot tell you whether the farmer who grew the lot was paid enough to plant again next season. It cannot show you the drying beds raised on their wooden frames, the cherries turned by hand every two hours so they dry evenly, or the particular angle of a hillside that gives a coffee its lift. Guji sits at 1,900 to 2,200 metres, high enough that the nights are properly cold, and that cold is not incidental — it is most of why the coffee tastes the way it does.

So much human attention and expertise, in fact, that even at four dollars a cup, chances were some person — or many people, or hundreds of people — along the line were being taken, underpaid, exploited.Dave Eggers, The Monk of Mokha

Eggers was writing about Yemen, not Ethiopia, but the sentence travels. It is the quiet fear underneath every cup of specialty coffee: that the chain between the hand that picked the cherry and the hand that holds the mug is long enough to lose someone in the middle. The only way we know to shorten that chain is to walk it ourselves, in person, twice a year, and to keep walking it until the math stops working in our favour at someone else's expense.

The lot, and the math

This year's Guji lot is a washed heirloom from a cooperative of forty-one smallholder families — jasmine on the nose, a clean bergamot acidity, and a finish that lingers like the last light of an afternoon. It becomes part of our Bright Hour collection. But before it was a tasting note, it was a conversation on a porch, in two languages and one shared cup, over coffee brewed on charcoal because that is how it is brewed there, and there was no reason to ask for anything else.

We pay above the Fairtrade floor on every lot, every harvest, and we sign multi-year agreements so a farmer can plan a season around us rather than guess at one. Eggers makes the arithmetic of this plain: if a farmer is paid even a modest multiple of the commodity rate, a break-even endeavour becomes something closer to a profession. "If the farmer gets forty times the commodity rate," he writes, "then what had been a break-even endeavor becomes a profession." We are not paying forty times anything — no one honestly is, at scale — but the direction of that sentence is the whole of our policy. We publish what we pay, lot by lot, because a standard you will not show is not a standard at all.

What the journey changes

Direct trade is not a marketing phrase for us; it is a logistics decision with a moral spine, and it costs more than buying on a broker's sample. Flights, drivers, translators, the days lost to a washed-out road in October — none of it shows up in a tasting note, and none of it is optional. We have made peace with the cost because the alternative is a coffee we cannot actually vouch for, dressed up in language that implies we can.

The coffee, brewed blind, tastes the same whether or not you know how it arrived. We have tested this on ourselves, more than once, half hoping the difference would be detectable and a little relieved that it is not — because it means the quality was never the point we were trying to prove. What changes is smaller and, we think, more durable: we know the names attached to the lot, we know the season was a fair one, and that knowledge sits somewhere in the cup whether or not it can be tasted there.

The Guji washed heirloom is available now in The Bright Hour collection, roasted to order.