The truck driver who swept the Cup of Excellence

Before Mulugeta Muntasha processed a single lot, he drove other people's coffee.

He grew up in Bursa, a village in Sidama that, until recently, didn't grow coffee at all. As a young man he moved to the neighbouring Arsi region and drove trucks — hauling cherry from collection points to a private washing station. That's how he learned the business from the bottom up, eventually becoming a collector himself, supplying Ethiopia's central market.

Then the climate shifted. Coffee became viable in Bursa, and with support from the local agricultural office, planting spread. In 2021 Mulugeta went home and built his own drying station — Dawencho.

That same year, it announced itself. Dawencho placed second in Ethiopia's Cup of Excellence with the farmer group, and sixth under Mulugeta's own name.

The year after, four of the competition's top ten lots were processed at his station — including the first-place coffee.

That first-place lot came from Legesse Botola, his brother-in-law. For a station barely a year old, in a region new to specialty, it was extraordinary.

Why a name on a bag is rare here

Ethiopia makes this kind of traceability rare. Most coffee moves through a national auction where buyers can't even cup before they purchase, and where the trail back to a producer is usually lost. A single named producer with his own station and 600 neighbouring outgrowers — coffee you can point to a person for — is the exception, not the rule.

Our Mulugeta Muntasha · Washed G1 is our “beyond” coffee — the one lot in the lineup with no sealed tank and no extended ferment. We're a house of controlled fermentation, and that's exactly why we carry it: control isn't one technique. A Grade 1 washed coffee, grown at 2,300–2,400 metres and processed by a station that swept the country's top table, is what discipline tastes like when there's nothing to hide behind. Apricot, honeysuckle, lime, raspberry. Clean.