Vivid notes of berry jam, black cherry, and apricot, complemented by a complex finish of dark cocoa and vanilla, all wrapped in a rich, full-bodied mouthfeel.
In Oromo, “Tokuma” means unity, and it suits this week’s coffee well. It’s a group lot from four members of the Tokuma Farmers Group in Jimma, Ethiopia: Mensur Abahika, Nesru Aba Nura, Mohammed Aba Nura and Biya Faris. Each of them looks after their own trees and processes their own coffee, and the lots come together as one cup of sweetness, clarity and expressive fruit.
Tokuma started the way a lot of good things do, with a few neighbours and friends. Smallholder farmers in the Agaro area began sharing what they’d learned about growing coffee and helping each other sell it, much like the farming communities Kiwis will know, where people pitch in and swap knowledge as a matter of course. Over time that informal circle grew into a proper collective built on quality, transparency and full traceability back to each farm. That matters more than it might sound. For years, most Ethiopian coffee passed through the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange, and the farmer’s name rarely travelled with it. Reforms in 2017 made it possible for more growers to export directly and put their own name on the label, and Mensur was one of the first to do so. Our importing partner Osito bought his lot in the 2019/20 harvest, their first single-producer coffee in Ethiopia, and has worked with the group for more than six years since. What began with one producer had grown to six members by the 2023/24 season. Osito’s approach is to go deeper rather than wider, and the group has repaid that with better quality, better consistency and more reliable shipping year on year.
The coffee itself is a natural, which is a method with deep roots in Ethiopia, partly because water isn’t plentiful everywhere. In Jimma it has become a deliberate choice rather than a workaround. The whole cherry is dried on raised beds for around three weeks, turned regularly and never rushed, which lets the sugars in the fruit work their way into the seed. Harvest runs from October to February, so while we’re heading into summer here, the farmers are at the busiest time of their year. Tokuma’s members have also been developing washed lots since the 2022/23 harvest, and the better facilities and closer attention that came with it have lifted their naturals too.
The varieties are JARC 74110 and 74112, both developed by the Jimma Agricultural Research Centre. They were selected from mother trees in the forests around Bishari village in Metu, in south-western Ethiopia, catalogued in 1974 and released in 1979. They’ve since become some of the most widely planted varieties in the country, prized by farmers for their resistance to coffee berry disease and reliable yields, and by drinkers for a clean, floral sweetness that suits a natural so well. It’s a long way from Jimma to Aotearoa, but a few weeks of careful drying on raised beds in Agaro has made the journey well worth it.
- Country: Ethiopia
- Region: Oromia
- Zone: Jimma
- District: Gomma
- Sub-region: Agaro
- Collective: Tokuma Farmers Group
- Importer: Osito
- Elevation: 1,950 to 2,150 m.a.s.l.
- Variety: JARC 74110 and JARC 74112
- Processing method: Natural, dried on raised beds for around three weeks