01 The home of arabica
This trip is for a very specific profile, and it is worth saying up front. Addis Ababa has no monuments, no old quarter and no catalogue of sights to justify the airfare on its own: the city is little more than a century old. What it does have, to a degree no other place on earth can match, is coffee.
The production figure rounds off the argument: Ethiopia is Africa's largest coffee producer and the world's fifth. Here coffee is not one export among others, it is the export, and you notice it in the fact that bean culture lives not in design cafés but in people's homes.
02 An hour and a half, three rounds
The ceremony — buna, in Amharic — is a complete procedure and takes between one and two hours. Fresh grass is spread on the floor, the green beans are washed and roasted in full view over charcoal in a long-handled pan until they smoke and fill the room with their smell. Then they are ground by hand and boiled in a black clay pot, the jebena.
Three rounds from the same pot: abol, tona and bereka. Getting up after the first is considered rude, and rightly so: the coffee is not finished yet.
It is served in small handleless cups, and served three times. Each round has a name — abol the first, tona the second, bereka the third — and each comes out a little milder than the last, because water is added again to the same jebena. Leaving after the first cup is cutting the thing in half.
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03 Where it is drunk
The short answer is: everywhere. The ceremony happens in homes, in courtyards, in small neighbourhood premises and in the back rooms of businesses that have nothing to do with catering. It is not a folkloric demonstration staged for visitors: it is the normal way of taking coffee, several times a week, across a whole country.
Alongside that, two more things coexist. On one hand, the legacy of Italian-style espresso, which has been here for almost a century and has left a thoroughly settled culture of the bar counter and the macchiato. On the other, a recent scene of roasters and speciality cafés working with specific Ethiopian origins: Yirgacheffe, Sidamo, Harrar, Limu.
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04 How the trip is put together
Four or five days in the city are enough if coffee is the reason. One morning for the market, another for the Entoto viewpoint and its forest, and the afternoons — plural — for sitting down. It is worth not stacking two ceremonies in the same day: between the caffeine and the 2,355 metres of altitude, the body notices.
If you want to reach the actual origin, you need more time and a lot of road. The forests where arabica grows wild are in the south-west and south-east of the country, several days' travel away, and there is no set-up or signposted circuit. It is perfectly possible, but it is not a day trip from the capital.
The month allows little debate: October to February. These are the dry months, with between 5 and 33 millimetres of rain and 248 to 288 hours of sunshine. July and August, with 238 and 242 millimetres and twenty-seven rain days, turn any journey into a negotiation with mud.
And the warning that decides it. If you come looking for a city, architecture or a list of sights, Addis Ababa will disappoint you, and that is not its fault: it is a hundred and forty years old and never promised that. If you come to understand where what you drink every morning came from, and you are willing to give a whole afternoon to a single pot, it is one of the few places in the world where that can genuinely be done.
