Features · All Issues Est. MMXIX Published Quarterly No. 07 — Origins
Issue No. 07 · Autumn 2025 7 Features Reading time: 79 minutes

The Features.

A map that isn't. Seven places, seven mornings, seven cups — each reported in full, each written at the length it required to make sense.

By the numbers

07

origins reported

Total

79min

of reading

On the ground

41days

of reporting

01
Ethiopia · Yirgacheffe, Gedeo Zone

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
Colombia · Pitalito, Huila

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
Yemen · Haraz Mountains

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
Rwanda · Nyamasheke, Western Province

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
Indonesia · Lintong, North Sumatra

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
Panama · Boquete, Chiriquí

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
Brazil · Mogiana, São Paulo

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