Three hours before sunrise, Tigist Mengesha is already on the dirt road that climbs out of Konga, a thermos of bunna in her left hand and a clipboard in her right. She is forty-two years old, holds an agronomy degree from Hawassa, and has, over the last eleven harvests, become the quiet authority everyone within a six-kilometre radius defers to when a question arises about cherry maturity, fermentation length, or — the most contested topic of all — drying time.
"Twelve days," she says, when I ask her about the latter. "Sometimes fifteen. Never less than ten. The buyers in Antwerp keep asking us to speed up. The buyers in Tokyo keep asking us to slow down. We don't listen to either of them. We listen to the cherries."
This is, in the small and unusually opinionated world of speciality coffee, an increasingly radical position. For the last decade, the dominant fashion in washed Ethiopian processing has tilted towards faster cycles, bigger volumes, and a flavour profile optimised for the Scandinavian filter market. Konga is moving in the other direction — and the cup, when it eventually reaches your kitchen in Lisbon or Brooklyn or Melbourne, makes a quietly compelling case that they may be right.
The cooperative now exports to seventeen roasters across Europe and Asia, but only those who pay above the Specialty Coffee Association's most recent transparency threshold. Mengesha is unsentimental about it. "If a roaster cannot afford to pay our farmers a living wage, they cannot afford to drink our coffee. It is very simple."
The Daily Roast began stocking Konga's January 2026 microlot last week. It will not be available for long, and we suggest, with no apology, that you order it at filter grind and brew it carefully.