Kokose Kebele

About the Coffee

Solomon Hamiso has been growing coffee his entire life on his farm in Kokose Kebele, a village in the Bensa district of Sidama, Ethiopia. For most of those years, he sold his harvested cherries to a local wet mill and had little control over what happened after they left his hands. In 2020, he changed that by building out his own processing operation on the farm, allowing him to handle everything from cherry to finished lot himself.

That shift mattered for a few reasons. Processing on-site means Solomon captures more of the value from his crop directly, rather than passing it downstream. It also creates full farm-level traceability, so a bag of his coffee can be tracked back to a single plot rather than blended into a larger lot from the area. His farm sits between 1,800 and 1,960 meters above sea level, and the cherries are processed using the natural method, meaning the whole fruit dries around the bean before it's removed. This approach takes longer and requires careful attention to avoid defects, but it's well suited to the climate at that elevation.

Kokose Kebele is home to around 500 smallholder producers, most farming plots of 1 to 2 hectares. The area's elevation, consistent climate, and nutrient-rich soils have helped it build a reputation for high-quality coffee over the past decade. Farmers in the village grow JARC selections, varieties developed by the Jimma Agriculture Research Centre in Ethiopia specifically for productivity and disease resistance at altitude. Coffee here is grown organically alongside food crops on the same plots.

About Ethica Coffee Roasters

Ethica Coffee Roasters is based in Canada and takes its name from Baruch Spinoza's 17th-century philosophical work, Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata, a text about aligning actions with reason and virtue. That framing shapes how they think about sourcing: they aim to trace coffee back to specific farmers and share those stories alongside the coffee itself, rather than treating origin as background detail.

Their sourcing focuses on specialty-grade green coffee, selected by hand and roasted in-house. They put weight on the human relationships behind each lot, which is part of why single-farm traceable coffees like Solomon Hamiso's stand out in their lineup. This isn't a blended regional lot; it's one farm, one producer, one season. For a home brewer, that means the coffee you're making has a specific name and story attached to it, not just a country of origin.

"There is an Ethica coffee that stands out in my mind - a Washed Castillo from Wilton Benitez that had rosemary as a tasting note. Yes, rosemary. I remember looking at that tasting note in disbelief, and then experiencing about the same disbelief by how much I loved the rosemary flavour!"

- Dean, Director of Coffee