By Lorrie Baumann
Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea’s Kossa Kebena is a finalist for a 2020 Good Food Award. Kossa Kebena comes from the Kebena Kossa farm in the Limmu Kossa district of western Ethiopia, and Crimson Cup sources the coffee through its Friend2Farmer direct trade initiative. The coffee is one of 403 products representing 42 states that were named as finalists this year from among 1,835 entries to the 10th annual Good Food Awards. Winners will be announced in January.
Kossa Kebena comes from a farmer who grew up in the coffee world and, as an adult, was able to obtain a piece of land and start growing his own with financing from Technoserve, a nonprofit organization that operates in 29 countries and works with men and women in the developing world to build competitive businesses. “His farm is in a preserved forest, called the Kebena forest. There’s no one there to exploit the minerals in the ground,” said Brandon Bir, Crimson Cup Coffee’s Director of Education and Sustainability. “There’s no commercial production in the forest other than coffee production, which is indigenous.”
Kossa Kebena is one of a long line of Ethiopian coffees recognized by the Good Food Awards. Bir explains the primacy of that coffee region in the competition by noting that arabica coffee is native to Africa. While coffee has been grown in Central and South America only since about 1800, African coffee farmers have been breeding and selecting seeds for their coffee trees for far longer. “The majority of heirloom coffee in Ethiopia has genetically worked itself out to be amazing,” he said. “Ethiopia is there because it’s just fantastic coffee that has worked itself out.”
The result, in the case of Kossa Kebena, is a coffee that’s naturally processed – dried on raised drying beds while the coffee beans are still clothed in the pulp that surrounds them in the cherry. In the cup, it has a syrupy body and tasting notes of bright fruit and sweet berries. “The cup itself is fruity but very clean for a natural-process coffee,” Bir said. In addition to the finalist recognition from the Good Food Awards, Kossa Kebena won a bronze medal at the 2019 Golden Bean North America roasting competition.
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“The market has changed in the last 10 years and so have we. We wanted to meet more producers, make more relationships because relationships are at the core of who we are,” he said. “Consumers have grown to appreciate more nuanced products, more conscious, intentional products. That intentionality has driven the coffee market to have more transparent coffee relationships. Consumers used to be specific about country. Now we talk about single farms. This is not Limmu region, Ethiopia. It’s a lot more specific, and a lot more intentional.”
Bir works with Crimson Cup’s Friend2Farmer program, started seven years ago as a way to connect the company directly with farmers and to help them grow better coffee so the farmers can earn premium prices without working through conventional certification programs, which often focus on their own particular objectives rather than on the needs that the indigenous growers identify for themselves, Bir said. “We’re very adaptive. A lot of certification programs have a certain protocol, maybe an emphasis on bird-friendly, some that focus on clean water, some that focus on social good,” he said. “We don’t know what different regions need, so we just ask. We’ve done everything from clean water projects, building a Specialty Coffee Association campus in Peru, quality control lab in Uganda, computers for students in Honduras. We’re adaptive, and that’s what makes us different.”
Another thing that makes Crimson Cup Coffee & Tea different is its unique business model that’s focused on helping other entrepreneurs start and grow their independent coffee houses. Not long after founding Crimson Cup in 1991, Greg Ubert, who is still the company’s President, realized that his real goal was in sharing his knowledge about how to build a successful coffee shop so they could be good customers for Crimson Cup coffee. He wrote a book called “Seven Steps to Success in the Specialty Coffee Industry” as a handbook for coffee shop start-up and operations. “That established our model of how we wanted to help people with retail expansion,” Bir said. Today, more than 200 entrepreneurs in 38 states have bought the book and used it as their blueprint to start their own coffee businesses through the company’s Power of the Cup® retail support program. “They buy the book, attend classes. Unlike a franchise, we will do the training, help with site selection, help with menu design,” Bir said. “We don’t have a franchise fee. If our partners are successful, then we’ll be successful.”
Crimson Cup’s Kossa Kebena coffee is available both to retailers partnered through Power of the Cup and to others. For more information, visit www.crimsoncup.com.