Everything You Need to Know About Ethiopian Coffee
Growing up in Addis Ababa, Sunday mornings were my favorite.
The ritual never changed. We would go to church, and by the time we walked back through the front door, the house had already transformed. The aroma of freshly roasted coffee met us before anyone said a word. My mother, draped in a traditional white dress with blue cross patterns and gold accents, would be settling in to host the coffee ceremony. Frankincense curled through the room. My aunts arrived. The neighbors arrived. Nobody needed an invitation, because Sunday was family day by default, and in an Ethiopian home, coffee is the invitation.
People call it the Ethiopian coffee ceremony, but honestly, “ceremony” is too small a word. It’s a culture — a whole world of history, ritual, flavor, and family — and I’d like to invite you into it. But I should start with a confession.
I didn’t actually like coffee
As a child, I would hang around the ceremony for everything except the coffee. The snacks, mostly. There was always himbasha, the soft celebration bread. There was kolo, the roasted barley you eat by the handful, and fandisha, fresh popcorn, which somehow tastes better when it’s served beside a jebena. And there was the laughter — aunts talking over each other, neighbors trading news, the giggles of kids like me orbiting the room.
But the coffee itself? Too bitter. I wanted no part of it.
My mother, who has never once lost a negotiation involving food, found the compromise. She started making my coffee with shai kimem — the Ethiopian tea spices: cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon. Something beautiful happens when the two merge. The warmth of the spice softens the coffee’s edges, and the cinnamon carries just enough natural sweetness that you don’t reach for sugar. That is how I came to love coffee, and to this day, it is the only way I have ever consumed it.
My mother didn’t invent spiced coffee out of thin air, either. One of the things I love most about coffee culture in the Horn of Africa is that it isn’t one culture at all. Different regions of Ethiopia — and Eritrea, where we also have heritage and family — each have their own way of brewing and drinking coffee, almost their own coffee tradition within the tradition. Where our family is in Eritrea, the tea spices aren’t stirred in afterward; they’re brewed together with the coffee itself. They also brew it with ginger, which my mother made for me once — and I loved that one too. But shai kimem was, and still is, my favorite.
I’m telling you this because if you’ve tried coffee and found it bitter, you’re not wrong and you’re not alone. Even someone born in the birthplace of coffee needed a way in. Mine came through spice.
Where it all began
Every cup of arabica coffee on earth traces back to Ethiopia. This is not national pride talking — Coffea arabica evolved wild in the highland forests of southwestern Ethiopia, in and around the Kaffa region, where it still grows under the forest canopy today. Many believe the word “coffee” itself descends from Kaffa.
The story every Ethiopian grows up with is the legend of Kaldi. Sometime around the ninth century, in the highlands of Kaffa, a young goatherd named Kaldi noticed something strange: his goats were dancing. They had been nibbling the bright red berries of a tree he didn’t recognize, and now they were leaping and prancing with an energy no goat should have. Curious, Kaldi tried the berries himself — and felt the same spark run through him.
He carried the berries to a nearby monastery, expecting wonder. Instead, the head monk declared them the devil’s work and threw them into the fire. And that is where the story turns: as the berries roasted in the flames, an aroma rose from the embers so irresistible that the monks pulled them out, ground them, and steeped them in hot water to preserve the smell. Without meaning to, they had roasted and brewed the world’s first cup of coffee. The drink kept them awake through their long night prayers, and word of the energizing berries began to spread.
Is the legend precisely true? Probably not. But the truth underneath it is solid: coffee began in Ethiopia, and by the 15th century it had crossed the Red Sea to Yemen, where Sufi monks brewed it to stay awake through long nights of devotion. From there it conquered the world — the Middle East, Europe, everywhere. Yet while the rest of the world turned coffee into a commodity, Ethiopia kept it as a ceremony.
There’s a saying at home: “Buna dabo naw.” Coffee is our bread. It means coffee isn’t a treat or a habit. It’s sustenance — the thing that holds the day, and the people in it, together.
The ceremony: three cups, two hours, one family
If you’ve only ever known coffee as something handed to you through a car window, the Ethiopian coffee ceremony will recalibrate you.
Fresh grass or flowers are scattered on the floor. Green beans are washed and roasted right there in front of you, in a long-handled pan over coals, and the smoking beans are carried around the room so everyone can wave the aroma toward themselves. That gesture — pulling the smoke toward your face with your hand — was one of my favorite parts as a kid. Then the beans are pounded by hand and brewed in the jebena, the round-bellied clay pot, and poured in one long, confident stream into small cups called sini.
The coffee is served three times, from the same grounds:
- Abol, the first round — the strongest cup, dark and full of intent
- Tona, the second — gentler, easier, the conversation cup
- Bereka, the third — the lightest, and the most meaningful. Bereka means “blessed,” and leaving before it’s poured is considered walking out on the blessing itself.
Three cups take time. That is the entire point. The ceremony can stretch two hours, and in those two hours, news is shared, problems are aired, marriages are teased into existence, and children like the one I was hover near the snack tray. Coffee in Ethiopia was never about caffeine. It’s about the people the caffeine gathers.
A geography of flavor
Ethiopia isn’t one coffee — it’s many. The country’s regions each grow beans with their own personality:
- Yirgacheffe — grown at high elevation, floral and tea-like, elegant. Many people’s favorite coffee on earth.
- Sidamo — bright with berry sweetness.
- Harar — wild, winey, ancient.
- Guji — syrupy and fruit-forward.
Because arabica has been evolving in Ethiopia longer than anywhere else, the genetic diversity there is unmatched — there are flavors in Ethiopian coffee that simply do not grow anywhere else on the planet.
Bringing Sunday with me
When I came to the United States for college, Sunday mornings were the thing I missed most. You cannot host a coffee ceremony in a dorm. There’s no version of roasting green beans over coals that a resident advisor will approve of.
My third year, I moved into an apartment, and the ritual came back to me almost immediately. I made coffee the only way I know how — Yirgacheffe beans, my mother’s shai kimem spices — and something familiar happened: my roommates and friends loved it. People lingered. The apartment filled with conversation the way our living room in Addis used to. It turns out the ceremony travels. Not the coals, not the grass on the floor, but the important part — the gathering.
The blend that found me
Years later, I started the Jebena Studio Experience, a workshop where people make a jebena from scratch with their own hands, and a traditional coffee ceremony is part of the experience. Naturally, I brewed the coffee the way I always have — spiced, warm, a little sweet from the cinnamon.
I did not expect what happened next. People didn’t just drink it. They asked to buy it. Until that moment, it had genuinely never occurred to me that something I consume every day — something that was simply “coffee” to me — would be something people ask for by name. That spiced Yirgacheffe, medium roast, became The Jebena Studio Blend, now the best-selling coffee in our store, and I am endlessly grateful for the community that has built itself around it. It is, I think, the best way I know to keep sharing the culture that raised me: one cup at a time, the way my mother shared it with me.
How to experience Ethiopian coffee yourself
If you’re curious, here is where I’d start:
- Come to a ceremony. We host a traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremony every Saturday at Bunna Cafe — come sit with us, and plan to stay a while. Stay through bereka. The blessing is worth it. And if you’d rather bring the ceremony to your people, we also host private group ceremonies and sessions at corporate offices and universities.
- Try it spiced. If black coffee has never won you over, brew it with cardamom, cloves, and cinnamon — shai kimem, the way my mother made it for me. Or skip a few steps and brew The Jebena Studio Blend, which carries her recipe in every bag. Let the cinnamon do the sweetening.
- Snack like an Ethiopian. Coffee at home is never served alone — there’s always fandisha, kolo, or himbasha beside it. Popcorn and coffee sounds unusual until you try it. Then it sounds obvious.
- Learn the three rounds. Abol, tona, bereka — knowing their names changes how you experience the ceremony. You stop drinking coffee and start participating in it.
- Slow down. Whatever else you take from this, take that. Ethiopian coffee is the opposite of a to-go cup. It asks for your time and repays it with company.
Somewhere in Addis Ababa this Sunday, someone’s mother is scattering fresh grass on the floor, and the smell of roasting coffee is drifting toward a room full of people who love each other. That is the world I come from. Everything I do now — the blend, the workshops, this article — is just my way of holding the door open and inviting you in.
Buna dabo naw. Coffee is our bread. Come have some.
Ready to taste the story? The Jebena Studio Blend is the coffee from this article — medium-roast Yirgacheffe with my mother’s shai kimem spices. Brew it at home, or better yet, come experience it the way it was meant to be shared: at our Saturday coffee ceremony at Bunna Cafe, or at a private ceremony we bring to you.
Ayda is the founder of Balè Moya. The spiced coffee from this story — medium-roast Yirgacheffe with her mother’s shai kimem — is available as The Jebena Studio Blend, and the Jebena Studio Experience hosts coffee ceremonies where you can taste it the way it was meant to be shared.