017 - Tagel Alemayehu

017 - Tagel Alemayehu2025 FREEZER SALE UPDATE (2025 12 17): From Christopher: Without exception, of the several hundred I cupped, this was my favorite washed coffee to come out of Ethiopia in 2025enough said. I'm thrilled to roast it again and chose to roast in a slightly lighter style than its original release to allow the expressiveness and complexity of this coffee to shine. The eighth coffee of our 2025 season takes us to Goro, Hambela, Ethiopia, where Tagel Alemayehu

2025 FREEZER SALE UPDATE (2025-12-17):

From Christopher: Without exception, of the several hundred I cupped, this was my favorite washed coffee to come out of Ethiopia in 2025—enough said. I'm thrilled to roast it again and chose to roast in a slightly lighter style than its original release to allow the expressiveness and complexity of this coffee to shine.

The eighth coffee of our 2025 season takes us to Goro, Hambela, Ethiopia, where Tagel Alemayehu operates a washing station and processes cherry from approximately 130 registered smallholder outgrowers. This washed coffee—two years in the making—comes from a two-week separation from peak harvest and presents in the cup acid-forward with sweet, structured stonefruit notes.

From Christopher: "I first visited Tagel Alemayehu's station in Hambela in December 2023. That year, I'd hoped to contract a container of washed coffee from the station for Crop to Cup's 2024 import, but back then, the station wasn't operating; finance issues and a foreign currency shortage made overproduction of coffees—particularly washed coffees, which under Ethiopia's coffee regulations must be exported—risky for exporters like Tagel.  

"And so the motor sat silent; the grassy hillside, covered during normal seasons with hundreds of raised beds, sat empty. A washing station at 2350 meters at the top of the hillside—chilly and windy even in the dry season—didn't make any coffee.

"Private washing stations dot Southern Ethiopia like clover—enterprises designed to produce volumes of coffee efficiently and move it to export, often through vertically-integrated channels—and I don't normally buy from them. From financial transparency and traceability of cherry to the way that outgrowers are paid, the interests and motivations of private washing stations owner rarely align with my own.

"But in Tagel, I saw not only alignment but a tale that inspired those in the community we spoke with—that redemption, through hard work, can follow misfortune. Tagel grew up in Hambela, the son of a coffee supplier who built the largest milling business in the Blue Hora area. When the coffee market collapsed, his father lost his business to the bank. Tagel worked as an accountant and cherry collector for export companies, learning the business, and built his reputation for precision and savvy while saving the money he earned—enough to buy his father's mill back from the bank.

"Eventually, he returned home to Hambela and built this station in Goro, where he hopes to bring his own children up in the coffee business.

"On the road leaving the station during that first visit, we'd seen a farmer bringing cherry up the road on our way in and stopped him to ask who he was selling it to: he beamed, proudly, telling us that he was selling it to Tagel. In a year when competition for cherry meant that ripeness and cherry selection was a challenge across the country, the cherry brought by this farmer gleamed bright-red. While the common practice in private washing stations is to offer a single payment to producers on delivery of cherry, Tagel registers the producers he buys from and provides a second payment at export—like cooperatives do—incentivizing growers to not only sell cherry to him but treat their coffee with the same care in picking that he promised to undertake in processing and marketing.

"While we weren't able to buy coffee from Tagel that year, we asked that he'd stay in touch—and to please let us know if he planned to make washed coffee at his station in Hambela.

"And he did: We returned to the station a year later, in December 2024—Moata riding shotgun in Tagel's car, Tagel flexing the reflexes he steeled in his youth as a race circuit driver, rocketing at 90kmph up the mountain with U2's "Songs of Innocence" clanging through the car's unimaginably bad speakers. When we got to the top of the mountain, the station's motor whirred; the beds were full.

"This coffee, a reward after two years of effort, is a small part of a two-week separation representing peak harvest bursting with complexity, stonefruit and acidity presenting in the cup with sweet notes of just-ripe Alphonso mango, tangerine, peach and pink lemonade."