Ethiopia

To most coffee drinkers, Ethiopia as a place feels forever on the other side of a tantalizing gap. The coffees themselves, when made well, can be mind-alteringly complex and overwhelmingly fragrant. They taste different from all other countries’ coffees and are never convincingly interchangeable with any other washed or sun-dried arabica on Earth. From Ethiopia’s landscape comes some of the best-known flavor descriptors in the coffee world (blueberry, jasmine, bergamot) that are considered global benchmarks of flavor. The source of Ethiopia’s allure as a truly sovereign and ancient culture of coffee is its imperviousness to so much of the industry that cash-cropped the coffee belt around it.