What 7 Years of Collaboration Means in Yirgacheffe

Hirut Berhanu is tall and fine-featured, with a proud stance and a ready laugh. Her sister Mahder is softer in appearance, always wearing a blazer and a quick smile. As vertically-integrated producers, roaster-retailers, and exporters, these two women operate in a world that barely welcomes them, and they do it well. They do it, in fact, better than any man I’ve ever met in Ethiopia. They do it with integrity, with attention to detail, and with rationality.

We met years ago.

I was a new coffee CEO at Catalyst Trade, learning a lot of lessons the hard way.

I, too, found my competence constantly questioned and my contributions diminished. I, too, was the decision-maker in a room full of broad shoulders that made little room for me or actively worked against me. And I, too, sought to create a reliable, sensible supply chain in the unfettered chaos of the Ethiopian coffee industry.

Fast-forward nearly seven years to the 2026 harvest, and you can see what this kind of collaboration can produce: excellence.

Over the years, that collaboration extended directly into processing itself.

This year our Ethiopia Coordinator Aron Fesaha spent weeks on-site during the harvest working alongside Hirut and Mahder’s team to hand-process our Yirgacheffe nanolots. He carefully selected cherries from higher-altitude Idido and painstakingly produced some of the most lovely, delicate, and balanced top lots out of Ethiopia this year.

These are not coffees that were discovered accidentally through a cupping table after export. They were shaped intentionally, in real time, through trust, proximity, and years of iterative work together.

L-R: Michael McIntyre (Sourcing & QC Director) and Aron Fesaha (Ethiopia Coordinator) in 2019

The Reality of Building in Ethiopia

This is a world frustrating to many buyers who simply cannot understand why it’s always changing, delayed, surprising (not in a good way), and opaque. Why isn’t it tied to the C Market? Why can’t you count on getting the same coffee year over year? And why, pray tell, is it so expensive?

Proudly the only uncolonized country in Africa, Ethiopia often feels like a force field where the rules the rest of the world operates by do not apply. Pricing is dictated weekly by the Coffee & Tea Authority, meaning offers may only last for days and contracts can be voided if filed at the wrong price. The government may enact sweeping legislative changes literally overnight and with no warning. Earlier this year, for example, the Gedeo Zone suddenly implemented a 5% tax on all coffee.

And with more than 80 distinct tribal identities and language groups, simply syncing up operationally can be extraordinarily difficult. So much is lost in translation.

As many of you know, I have spent more than a decade deeply invested in Ethiopia, with Ethiopian business partners, co-founders, investors, advisors, and employees. Pinning my career to a country this difficult to navigate has brought intense personal and financial loss, remarkable cultural exposure, reputational growth, and the kind of wisdom that can only be gained by actually doing the work.

Aron Fesaha (left) and workers at Demeka Becha Washing Station, c. 2019

Why Most Ethiopian Sourcing Stays Shallow

Most importers stay on the surface of these dynamics, and with good reason. There is enormous risk, and it is difficult to defray. Simply navigating Ethiopia well is a full-time job, and most importers have many origins represented in their offer lists.

Plus, simply buying Ethiopian coffee “off the shelf” can still produce an acceptable result. Risk can be managed through accept/reject-style buying and by avoiding deeper investment into expensive or highly experimental coffees.

For many businesses, this is the only practical way to navigate these realities.

But you don’t get to exceptional coffee by leaning away from the mess.

You get there by leaning in.

By building and trialing and case-studying and learning, then iterating over and over and over again.

By investing in people and projects and coffees even when there is no assured return, simply because you cannot do otherwise.

By unpicking the Gordian knot of difficult logistics, finance challenges, processing variables, and deeply human business relationships.

The best Ethiopian coffees are rarely accidental. More often, they are the result of sustained investment over years.

Swift Coffee Sourcing is a young company built on a long-term relational backbone that makes this kind of focus the norm rather than the exception.

Aron Fesaha on site with pulper, c. 2016

What It Takes to Process Exceptional Coffee

Aron loves to work.

He loves arguing with lazy workers to improve a process. He loves living on the road in sub-par hostels with iffy electricity because he is so far off the beaten path. He loves his hands in the cherries—flicking under-ripes off to the low-density channel, testing whether fermented parchment clings to his fingers or slides off cleanly, spreading coffee thinner and more evenly on the drying beds.

Without this kind of visceral willingness to do the work, exceptional coffee only happens once in a while by accident—when the stars align, the weather behaves, and a random truckload of cherries happens to arrive from precisely the right hillside that nobody bothered to track.

Exceptional coffee is usually treated as a mystery. More often, it is the result of obsession coupled with real sacrifice.

One example is Layered Ferment, a processing methodology developed years ago by our Sourcing & QC Director Michael McIntyre.

Rather than treating fermentation as a single linear process, Layered Ferment intentionally manipulates fermentation stages, density separation, and drying behavior to create more structure, clarity, and balance in the final cup. The process requires far more labor, observation, and adjustment than conventional processing—and it only works when everyone involved is aligned enough to execute carefully.

That alignment is impossible to manufacture quickly. It is the result of years of shared work and trust between producer, processor, exporter, and importer.

Layered Fermentation happening in action at Dumerso washing station

The Coffees Themselves

This year’s Dumerso lots represent some of the most refined coffees we have produced together to date.

Aron focused heavily on higher-altitude Idido cherry selection, careful density separation, and meticulously controlled processing and drying practices. The resulting profiles are delicate and articulate rather than aggressively process-driven: florals, citrus structure, layered sweetness, and remarkable balance.

These are limited nanolots built intentionally rather than broadly scaled production coffees. Volumes are extremely finite.

VISIT OUR OFFER LIST TO SEE AVAILABILITY.

Why This Matters

Specialty coffee still talks constantly about excellence, even as the industry narrative shifts under enormous price pressure, operational pressure, and cultural fatigue.

And at the core of it, most people in specialty coffee are here because they want to do things better.

Better coffee.
Better systems.
Better relationships.
Better outcomes.

If we were interested only in efficiency and standardization, we would probably be selling widgets or working in banking.

Meanwhile, the industry itself has become louder, more crowded, more urgent, and increasingly abstract.

But coffee cannot be drop-shipped from origin.

It is a living, breathing agricultural product owned and moved by human beings across contracts, roads, warehouses, ports, languages, and oceans before it ever reaches a roaster.

As the market accelerates in speed and abstraction, relationships still form the backbone of how meaningful work gets done—especially the good stuff.

At Swift Coffee Sourcing, we focus on stewardship: stewardship of coffee, stewardship of the people connected to that coffee, and stewardship of the long-term relationships that make exceptional outcomes possible.

Our partnership with Hirut and Mahder has now survived COVID, multiple wars, enormous market volatility, and even the collapse of my previous company. The relationship itself remained intact and, in many ways, strengthened through those pressures.

That resilience is not sentimental. It is operational.

Collaborate With Us

These coffees are now available in limited quantities through Swift Coffee Sourcing.

Reach out for samples, allocations, or conversations around how these lots may fit into your program.

L-r: Hirut Berhanu, Emily McIntyre (Swift CEO), and Mahlet Berhanu, another sister