Bette Buna: Better, kinder Ethiopian coffees

We recently launched our first coffee from Bette Buna, a family-owned Ethiopian coffee company founded by Hester Westerveld Syoum and Dawit Syoum, and it's phenomenally good. Ethiopia Ashu Syoum Natural is also our first fresh crop Ethiopian coffee of any kind this year and a big sign of things to come from us. At a score of 90 points, it has that classic Guji natural profile that we dream about — juicy fruits, clean florals and loads of sweetness. This alone is enough to make it our favourite coffee of the year so far, but the relationships behind it are far more important.

These days, Ethiopia can be one of the most complicated countries from which to ethically source coffee, especially during the past six years of ongoing tribal conflict. Bette Buna stands apart from business as usual, and, whenever we connect with farmers who are this aligned with Skylark values, we think it's important to support them with our buying and our writing. Moving forward, we're aiming for the bulk of our Ethiopian coffees to come from Bette Buna — a slightly bold forecast — and we're encouraging all of our roaster friends to connect with them as well. Here's why we would make such a decision:

Equal Opportunity Employment 

Bette Buna is an equal opportunity employer, which is vanishingly rare in a culture that doesn't typically provide meaningful work for differently abled or disabled people. They employ people with disabilities (particularly deaf people), families of people with disabilities, as well as other largely disenfranchised groups such as single mothers who struggle to find work, and especially work that accommodates childcare for working mothers in an agrarian society. There are many parallels between Bette Buna's work and the work we do at Pro Baristas. Both support people further from employment while building pathways back to it, not only through funded training but by offering long-term support and connections to community. We're so like minded, in fact, that we feel compelled to work together as closely as possible! 

A Completely Transparent Supply Chain

We might be dropping a bit of a truth-bomb here, but coffee you buy from Ethiopia often isn't what it says on the bag. It's actually a fairly common practice for exporters to swap coffees, mislabel them, or blend them with other lots to meet a certain bag quota. Because Ethiopian coffee is so generally excellent and has distinct regional profiles, this practice often goes unnoticed or gets written off as coffee changing flavours during shipment. With Bette Buna, the traceability is exceptional. Every lot specifically names the people involved at each stage of production, from the people who picked the cherries to those who processed and milled the coffee. This level of transparency is almost unheard of in Ethiopia. Not only do we know we’re getting the same coffees we tasted pre shipment, but we also know that the people who did the work are getting fair wages — everyone involved is adding value and being valued. 

Sharing opportunities

Coffee production in Ethiopia accounts for about a third of the country's GDP but more than 90 percent of people working in coffee don’t make a livable income. This is the main reason Hester and Dawit founded the company: To professionalise coffee and help generate sustainable incomes. Much like Skylark, they don’t just want to make money, they want to create stability and prosperity. For more info on their training programme we’d highly recommend reading more here.

Mutual Support

Finally, Hester and Dawit are remarkably collaborative and we're helping boost their enterprise by committing to buy their coffee early and often — a key way of mitigating risk for producers. This is sometimes where specialty coffee fails farmers by floating from coffee to coffee each year without long term commitments. This leaves much of the risk to producers, and we'd actually like to share the load by building in a promise to buy.

We're already communicating regularly and exchanging ideas, learning from each other and helping each other sell coffee. We're recommending Bette Buna to other roasters with similar values, and Bette Buna helps promote Skylark to coffee shops. At the end of the month, we’ll be visiting some cafes and roasteries with Hester around the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany in the spirit of mutual support. This is really the dream of specialty coffee in practice: True partnerships between like-minded, values-aligned coffee people working together across the supply chain to try to change the way coffee is traded and enjoyed.