BURSA UNIQUE

Mulugeta Muntasha came back to Bursa in 2021 after years away driving trucks in Arsi, built a drying station, and was placing in the Ethiopian Cup of Excellence within months. Second place in the first year. The year after that, four of the ten best lots in the country had come through his station, including the one that won it, and he has kept placing since. He runs a small group of sites across Sidama now and takes cherry from a few hundred neighbouring smallholders who work garden plots around Bursa. The altitude is the other half of the story. Up there the water comes out of the ground cold and the nights are colder still, so a ferment can be held long and slow without ever running away from you.

Ethiopian heirloom, sometimes written as mixed heirloom, is not a single named variety at all. It is the term used for the thousands of indigenous landrace types that grow across Ethiopia, the birthplace of Arabica coffee. Many of these plants have never been formally catalogued, and have instead been selected and passed down by farming families over countless generations, each one adapted to the exact hillside and altitude where it grows. This deep genetic diversity is a big part of what makes Ethiopian coffee so distinctive, giving cups that are floral and citric with a delicate tea like quality, bright acidity, and layered fruit that can shift from one village to the next.

Fermentation speeds up when it is warm and slows down when it is cold, and almost everything a producer tastes in a ferment comes back to how fast it ran. Holding the tank cold is the simplest way to take control of that. At high altitude the water coming out of the ground is already cold and the nights are colder still, so a producer who wants a long ferment does not need much equipment, only patience and the discipline to stop at the right moment. What comes out is a coffee that has had the time to build sweetness and structure without ever picking up the ferment flavours a warm tank starts throwing off once it gets away.