Dispatch
Dispatch: Kintamani, at first light
On the quiet revival of Bali's subak-based coffee cooperatives, and the unlikely role of citrus intercropping.
Origins,
unabridged.
Seven reported features on where coffee actually comes from — the forested highlands of Gedeo, the terraced slopes of Haraz, the volcanic rims of Boquete — and the hands that still do the work the rest of the industry talks about.
Seven features · Three dispatches · One letter EDITOR'S LETTER
Noor Abernethy
London, October
London, October
Opening p. 3
On the difficulty, and the necessity, of the word origin.
The word is doing a lot of work — country, region, lot, slope, the particular set of hands that picked the cherries before breakfast. The gap between the first meaning and the last is the gap this magazine tries, issue by issue, to close.
"The coffee is ready.
Please, sit down."
Please, sit down."
In this issue
Seven origins,
seven mornings.
Reported from Gedeo, Pitalito, Haraz, Nyamasheke, Lintong, Boquete, and Mogiana, between March and August of two thousand twenty-five.
- 01 The quiet authority of Yirgacheffe Ethiopia p. 12
- 02 The cartographers of Huila Colombia p. 26
- 03 Against the wind, in Haraz Yemen p. 40
- 04 The women of Nyamasheke Rwanda p. 54
- 05 The wet ground of Sumatra Indonesia p. 68
- 06 A cloud forest and its price Panama p. 82
- 07 The scale of Mogiana Brazil p. 96
The Featuresseven
Hover a card to surface.01
The quiet authority of Yirgacheffe
In the forested highlands south of Addis Ababa, smallholders stubbornly practice a craft that the rest of the world is still trying to imitate.
ET 14 min read →
02
The cartographers of Huila
A generation of young Colombian farmers is learning to think of altitude the way winemakers think of terroir — and rewriting the map, one microlot at a time.
CO 11 min read →
03
Against the wind, in Haraz
In the terraced highlands west of Sana'a, coffee is being grown the way it has been grown for five hundred years — and, for the first time in a generation, sold the way it deserves to be.
YE 12 min read →
04
The women of Nyamasheke
On the western shore of Lake Kivu, a cooperative founded by war widows has quietly become one of Africa's most exacting producers of washed Bourbon.
RW 9 min read →
05
The wet ground of Sumatra
Giling basah — the wet-hulling process unique to Indonesia — produces a coffee that the rest of the world is not sure how to classify, and that Sumatran farmers have no interest in changing.
ID 10 min read →
06
A cloud forest and its price
In the Chiriquí highlands, a single varietal rescued from near-extinction has redrawn the economics of specialty coffee — and raised questions the industry has not yet answered.
PA 13 min read →
07
The scale of Mogiana
Brazilian coffee is often spoken of dismissively, in the language of commodity. Spend three days on a family farm in São Paulo's Mogiana region and the language starts, quietly, to break down.
BR 10 min read →
Dispatches & Columns
Short form · p. 104 — 112 Letter
A letter, from the editor
On the difficulty, and the necessity, of the word 'origin'.
Column
Notes on altitude
Why the number on the label matters, and why it does not matter as much as the label suggests.
✦ · ✦ EST. MMXIX
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