Ethiopia Aricha: Our Summer Collaboration with KonjoMe
Konjo Me opened at the Detroit Shipping Company back in March, which put them at 474 Peterboro, about a block down from our roastery at 412. I'd like to tell you this collaboration came out of a strategy meeting, but the honest version is that I just kept walking down there to eat.
Helina Melaku started Konjo Me as a pop-up in 2020, when the shutdown was pushing me from basement roasting into doing this full-time, though we came at it from opposite directions.
I was teaching myself a trade from scratch, while she was reaching back for one she'd grown up with in Ethiopia and building a business out of cooking the way she was taught to cook there. That means the berbere on her menu is a red pepper blend shipped in from Ethiopia and sun-dried there rather than approximated here, her injera is teff flour left to ferment for two days before it ever touches heat, and her doro wot takes the better part of a day to make.
Knowing that's the standard she holds her own ingredients to, I wasn't about to hand her a coffee I couldn't talk about in the same detail.
Why an Ethiopian coffee for this collaboration
Ethiopia isn't a clever pick for a collaboration like this so much as the obvious one, since the plant is native there and the practice of drinking it started there too. Helina grew up around coffee the way you grow up around anything that's simply part of the house, and I've been buying Ethiopian lots since I started roasting, so we both came to the table already pointed the same way.
The trouble is that Ethiopia is an enormous answer to a fairly small question.
Coffee grows there across climates that have almost nothing in common, and a bean off the dry northeastern highlands bears no real resemblance to one from the southern forests. Settling on the country took about a minute, and settling on the lot took considerably longer.
Where Aricha coffee comes from: Yirgacheffe and the Gedeo zone
What we landed on is a washed lot from Aricha, a community in the Yirgacheffe region of Ethiopia's Gedeo zone that holds one of the oldest coffee growing traditions anywhere on earth. It's also genuinely difficult to reach. Getting there means flying into Addis Ababa, catching a short flight down to Hawassa, then driving four hours of paved road to the Idido washing station, at which point the pavement simply ends. From there the farms climb out across mountain terrain, some of them twenty minutes away by motorcycle and some closer to an hour.
How our Ethiopia Aricha is grown and processed
There's no single farm to name on the bag. The coffee comes from smallholders working plots of a tenth of a hectare up to two, growing Ethiopian landrace varieties at roughly 1,950 meters in among native trees like the false banana that shade the coffee and feed the soil. Cherry comes down the mountain by motorcycle, horse, and donkey to collection centers, then by truck to the central station at Adorsi, where it's depulped, fermented 48 to 72 hours in cement tanks, washed, and dried slowly by hand.
Ethiopia Aricha tasting notes
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It makes a good hot cup and a considerably better iced one, which is most of the reason we timed the release the way we did.
Where to buy the collab: Roastery, online, and down the street
Bags are available at the roastery and online now. Once you've got one, walk down to 474 and get a plate from Helina, because konjo means beautiful, and she'll tell you Konjo Me is about what's inside you rather than what you look like, which isn't a bad way to think about a bag of coffee either, though mostly it's an excuse to go eat her food.
