For most of his working life, Mulugeta Muntasha moved other people's coffee.
He grew up in Bursa, a village in the Arbegona district of Sidama where, until recently, coffee wasn't really a crop. As a young man he went to the neighbouring Arsi region and drove trucks — hauling cherry from collection points to private washing stations, watching other people's harvests ride in the back. Later he became a collector himself, buying coffee and supplying the central market. Two decades of learning the trade from the outside in: what a good cherry looks like, what a station does with it, where the value gets made and where it gets lost.
What brought him home was the weather.
As temperatures shifted, coffee became viable in Bursa in a way it hadn't been before. Farmers started planting, the local agricultural office supported it, and a village with no real coffee history suddenly had trees. In 2021 Mulugeta went back and built a drying station of his own.
What happened next
Ethiopia's Cup of Excellence is judged blind. Lots are cupped and scored on quality alone, with no idea whose coffee is in the bowl.
In his first year, three of Mulugeta's lots placed: second, sixth, and fifteenth. The fifteenth-place certificate hangs framed on his wall, and the score is printed on it — 88.18. That was the coffee that came fifteenth.
The following year, four of the entire competition's top ten coffees were processed at his station — first, fourth, sixth and eighth. Our importer notes the first-place lot that year belonged to his brother-in-law, farmed nearby and processed at the same beds.
A station barely a year old, in a district with almost no coffee tradition, was suddenly responsible for a significant share of the best coffee in a country of roughly fifteen million coffee farmers.
Why it's harder than it sounds
It's worth understanding what that takes in Ethiopia specifically, because the system is not built for it.
Most Ethiopian coffee moves through a national auction, where lots are graded, pooled and sold in fixed contracts. Buyers generally can't taste before they buy, and by the time coffee reaches an exporter the trail back to the person who grew and processed it has usually gone cold. It's an efficient way to move a commodity and a poor way to reward a craftsman — if you do exceptional work, the system struggles to tell anyone it was you.
The way around it is to be a producer who processes and exports in your own name. That is rare, and it is the harder road: you carry the risk, the equipment, the drying space and the quality control yourself. Mulugeta took it. Today Bursa Speciality Coffee collects over 1.2 million kilograms of cherry a year from around 300 farming families, farms organically, and runs five separate processing methods — cherry, natural, washed, anaerobic and honey — on the same site. His son, Degefu, is coming up behind him.
Fifteen years in the industry, five of them with his name on the door.
What we buy
We buy two of his lots, and we buy them for opposite reasons.
The first is washed Grade 1 — Ethiopia's top export grade, grown between 2,300 and 2,400 metres. Washed coffee has nowhere to hide: no fermentation character to lean on, no drying trick to add sweetness. It's the process that shows you exactly how carefully the cherry was picked and how cleanly the station works. It cupped 87 on arrival, the highest score of anything we've bought. It tastes of apricot, lime, raspberry and honeysuckle.
The second is his anaerobic natural: the same hands, the same hillside, the cherries sealed away from oxygen instead. Papaya, strawberry wine, watermelon and black tea — the fruit that fermentation can build when someone is controlling it on purpose. That one lands shortly.
We're a house built on controlled fermentation, so people occasionally ask why we carry a washed coffee at all. This is the answer. Control isn't one technique — it's a standard. A producer who can win blind, repeatedly, across five different processes has that standard. Our job was to find him and not waste what he made.
