Coffee With Ayub

COFFEE INDUSTRY: Stakeholder Introduction Topic: Vertical Integration

⚖️ For years, the road to export ran through one place: the ECX auction floor. ⚖️ Vertical Integration opened a second route around it. ⛩ Under VI, an exporter owns the farms, washing stations or coffee bean purchase contracts directly with the farmers and outgrowers supplying them, so the coffee is sold abroad without ever being auctioned. ➖ That keeps each lot traceable to where it was grown, which is a big part of why buyers who care about origin like it. It also puts exporters into the chain much earlier, often with fewer hands ( like brokers, collectors or even stations ) between the farm and the buyer. 🌱 A related route, the Direct Specialty License, does an almost similar job for specialty lots bought straight from cooperatives and washing stations. #coffeewithayub #coffeeindustry #verticalintegration

COFFEE JOURNEY: From Origin to Cup Topic: Milling

⚙️ The Drying is done. The coffee is hard, dry, and still sealed inside its shell. Next stop: the mill. ⚙️ Milling turns dried coffee into the green bean that gets exported, in four steps: 1) Hulling: The shell comes off. Washed coffee arrives in its thin parchment, so only that is removed. Natural coffee dried as a whole cherry, so the entire dried husk (skin, pulp, and parchment) comes off in one go. 🐚 2) Sorting by size and density: The beans are run through screens and density tables which separate them, so only even and solid ones move on. 〰️ 3) Defect removal: Machines and hand-pickers pull out the reject coffee (black, broken, insect-damaged, etc...) beans. 📛 4) Bagging: Clean green coffee is packed into 60 kg jute bags. 👝 It's careful work. How well this step is done affects the grade the coffee gets later. What comes out is green coffee, waiting to be inspected before it's allowed to leave the country. #coffeewithayub #coffeejourney #milling

COFFEE KNOWLEDGE: Behind the Bean Topic: The Endocarp (Parchment)

🪵 Underneath the mucilage sits the endocarp. A tougher, papery shell more commonly called parchment. 🪵 This layer is thin but rigid, almost like a thin wood casing wrapped around the bean. It's actually what gives parchment coffee its name. Once the mucilage is washed or dried off, what's left is a bean still sealed inside this husk, and it stays that way through drying and storage. Parchment isn't removed until right before export because it protects the bean from damage and moisture during transport 🛡, which is part of why coffee is often shipped and stored in parchment form for as long as possible and only hulled at the final milling stage. ⚙ One more layer between a cherry and a cup — and one of the last ones to go. #coffeewithayub #coffeeknowledge #endocarp

COFFEE INDUSTRY: Stakeholder Introduction Topic: The ECX

🧩 This is where consolidated coffee has traditionally become a tradeable commodity. 🧩 The Ethiopian Commodity Exchange launched in 2008 to fix a real problem: unreliable payments and almost no price transparency for farmers and traders. 💰 👨‍🌾 Suppliers brought graded lots to the exchange, sold through open auction to licensed exporters, with the exchange guaranteeing payment on both sides. For almost a decade, trading through the ECX was mandatory. That changed in 2017, when Vertical Integration let exporters buy directly from suppliers and cooperatives, bypassing the auction floor. Since then, the balance between ECX and direct trading has shifted year to year, depending on pricing, policy, and demand. ⏰ It's no longer the only road into the export market, and these days, it isn't always the main one either. #coffeewithayub #coffeeindustry #ecx

COFFEE JOURNEY: From Origin to Cup Topic: Drying

☀️ Whatever method the cherry went through, it all leads here: spread out in the sun, waiting. ☀️ Coffee is dried slowly, usually on raised mesh beds ( African Beds ) that let air move underneath as well as over the top. Workers rake and turn it by hand several times a day, since unevenly dried coffee can develop mold or inconsistent flavor. Depending on the method and the weather, this stretch can take anywhere from one to three weeks. 🕰 The moisture content target is around 10.5-11.5% — dry enough to store safely, not so dry that the bean becomes brittle or loses quality. Too fast, and the coffee dries unevenly. Too slow, and it risks spoiling before it ever gets there. 💧 It looks like waiting. It's actually one of the most closely watched steps in the entire process. #coffeewithayub #coffeejourney #drying

COFFEE KNOWLEDGE: Behind the Bean Topic: The Mucilage

🫟 Beneath the pulp sits a layer that's thin, slippery, almost gel-like coating clinging to the parchment underneath. 〰️ This is the mucilage, and it's mostly made of pectin and natural sugars left behind once the fruit's flesh is removed. It's sticky enough that it has to be actively broken down before the bean can dry properly. This is exactly why the washed process 🚰 involves soaking beans in water for a day or two, letting that layer loosen until it rinses away. Leave it on instead of washing it off, and you get the honey process ; the same mucilage, left to dry directly onto the parchment, adding its own sweetness to the final cup. 🍯 ☕️ One layer, two completely different outcomes, depending on what happens next. #coffeewithayub #coffeeknowledge #mucilage

COFFEE INDUSTRY: Stakeholder Introduction Topic: Suppliers

🔑 Nothing moves in Ethiopia's coffee trade without going through a supplier 🔑 Suppliers (Akrabis) are licensed local traders sitting at one of the most important choke points in the entire chain – consolidating it into sellable volume, processing it and then deciding where it goes next: onto the ECX auction floor, or straight to a Vertical Integration exporter under contract. Without that consolidation step, individual farmers with a few sacks each would have almost no practical way to reach the formal market at all 📉 Most of that coffee doesn't reach a supplier directly due to most farmers selling first to a sebsabi, a village-level collector 📎 , who then carries it up to a supplier. That means the supplier is often the first point in the entire chain where scattered, small-scale harvests actually become one tradeable lot. 🔋 No supplier, no market access. That's how much weight this one role carries. #coffeewithayub #coffeeindustry #suppliers

COFFEE JOURNEY: From Origin to Cup Topic: Processing Methods

🧺The basket is full. The cherries are off the tree. Now the clock starts.⏳ A picked cherry needs to be processed within hours, or it starts going bad. How it's processed is one of the biggest choices in coffee! Methods:- 1) Washed/Wet:The pulp is removed almost immediately. The beans sit in water for a day or two to strip away the sticky mucilage before drying. This tends to produce a cleaner, brighter, more acidic cup. 🌊 2) Natural/Dry:The whole cherrys skin, pulp, and all is dried while still intact with the bean still inside. The fruit sugars slowly soak in as it dries, giving a heavier, often fruitier, sometimes wine-like profile. ♨️ 3) Honey:The skin is removed while some or all of the sticky mucilage is left on during drying, giving a cup somewhere between washed and natural, with its own distinct sweetness. 🍯 Same cherry and tree, depending on the method – a completely different cup. #coffeewithayub #coffeejourney #processingmethods

COFFEE KNOWLEDGE: Behind the Bean Topic: The Mesocarp

Right under the skin sits the mesocarp — the soft and fleshy sweet pulp that makes the coffee cherry an actual fruit instead of just a shell. It carries most of the cherry's natural sugar content, which is part of why it tastes noticeably sweet when tasted raw. Some pickers even chew on it straight off the tree 😁 It's thin, a little sticky, and surprisingly thin compared to the exocarp. It's the layer that gets removed early on, right after picking, to get down to the bean inside. ♻️ That pulp doesn't just get thrown away. A lot of it gets reused in large volumes. ♻️ Sometimes as compost for plants, sometimes dried and turned into cascara: a tea made from the leftover skin and pulp. ☕️ #coffeewithayub #coffeeknowledge #mesocarp

COFFEE INDUSTRY: Stakeholder Introduction Topic: Smallholder Farmers

🛖 Every stakeholder in this chain ECTA, ECX, exporters, banks, ports and many more exist because of millions of small family plots growing coffee alongside other crops. 🏢 Ethiopia has over 5 million coffee-farming households, most working plots under 2 hectares, often growing coffee alongside food crops rather than as a single monoculture. 🌳 Most trees are heirloom varieties found nowhere else, passed down through generations rather than commercially bred. 👨‍🌾 Farmers typically sell their harvest to a local collector(sebsabi) or cooperative, rarely directly to an exporter or the ECX itself. Everything else in this industry like grading, financing, logistics, export and so on are built to move what starts here. #coffeewithayub #coffeeindustry #farmers

COFFEE JOURNEY: From Origin to Cup Topic: Harvesting

🌤 Sunrise, a hillside, a woven basket strapped to the waist, and a full day of walking ahead. ☀️ Pickers move tree to tree, checking each cluster by hand. Only the deep red cherries come off while the rest stay for another day. Same tree, walked past again and again across the season, sometimes six or seven times, because ripening just doesn't happen all at once. Baskets fill slowly, cherry by cherry, hours at a stretch. ⏰ Nobody's rushing this part. You can't. ⏰ An experienced picker can even tell ripeness by feel alone. This selective, hand-picking method is the standard across Ethiopia, where most coffee still comes from smallholder farms instead of large mechanized estates. #coffeewithayub #coffeejourney #harvesting

COFFEE KNOWLEDGE: Behind the Bean Topic: The Exocarp (Coffee Cherry)

The exocarp is the outermost layer of the coffee cherry, a thin, waxy skin that covers and protects the fruit underneath. It starts green and hard, then softens as it ripens ; shifting from yellow to a deep red. The waxy coating also locks in moisture, keeping the fruit from drying out while it develops on the tree. Color is the signal: deep red means ripe and ready, yellow or green means it needs more time, and dark or purple usually gets left out — over-ripeness can add unwanted flavors to the coffee. 🍇 Botanically, it's the same skin found on cherries, plums, and other stone fruits — coffee just happens to be one of the few fruits we don't eat. 🍑 #coffeewithayub #coffeeknowledge #exocarp

COFFEE INDUSTRY: Stakeholder Introduction Topic: The Value Chain

♻️ Coffee moves through a long chain of people and stakeholders. ♻️ Farmers | Suppliers | Exporters | Regulators | Banks | Inland logistics | and International Buyers all play a part in getting it from farm to market. Coffee now holds a unique position among Ethiopia's exports. It accounts for more than 30% of the country's foreign currency earnings. Among agricultural and food exports, it's increasingly spoken of as the gold of grains 🥇 : a commodity carrying that level of value and weight in the national economy. Understanding how these stakeholders connect — regulation, movement, and market value is the foundation for spotting opportunity in this industry. #coffeewithayub #coffeeindustry #valuechain

COFFEE JOURNEY: From Origin to Cup Topic: The Full Journey

A cup of coffee travels further than most people realize before it ever reaches a hand. It starts on a tree, as a cherry, picked by hand. From there, that cherry is processed to remove its layers : washed, dried, and milled down to a raw green bean. ☕️ That bean is graded, sorted, and prepared for export, crossing borders before it reaches any roaster in the world. Only then is it roasted, ground, and brewed into the cup someone actually drinks. Farm to processing. Processing to export. Export to roastery. Roastery to cup. Every one of those stages has its own story, its own decisions, and its own impact on what ends up in the final cup. #coffeewithayub #coffeejourney #fulljourney

COFFEE KNOWLEDGE: Behind the Bean Topic: The Coffee Cherry

Most people picture a bean when they think of coffee. But it actually starts life as a fruit. A small red cherry, six layers deep, long before it's ever roasted or brewed.🍒 From the outer skin down to the seed itself, each layer has its own name, texture, and job to do — all laid out in the image above. Strip those layers away differently, washed, natural, or honey process — and you get an entirely different cup, even from the exact same cherry. That's the part most people never see. This is the first of many looks behind the cup, one layer of the industry at a time. #coffeewithayub #coffeeknowledge #coffeecherry

COFFEE IS MORE THAN WHAT ENDS UP IN YOUR CUP☕️🌍

Behind every cup is a world of people, knowledge, businesses, and opportunities. My journey into coffee began with curiosity. As I started exploring the industry, meeting people, and seeing the journey behind the bean 🌱, I realized how much exists beyond the final cup—and how much there is still to learn. I'm still learning, building, meeting people, and finding my place in this industry. That journey is why I created Coffee With Ayub. Here, we'll explore the coffee journey—from:- • Farming and processing to 🌱 • Trade 📦 • Logistics 🚢 • Digitalization 💻 • Brewing, and beyond ☕️ We'll share knowledge, insights, opportunities, and perspectives from across the coffee world.

The goal: network, knowledge, and opportunities—while creating meaningful business and wealth along the way. 🚀

Welcome to the journey. Stay tuned for what's ahead. ☕️🌍 #coffeewithayub #networking #coffeeexport #learningjourney