How We Source Our Beans - A Trip to Yirgacheffe
By Maya Osei, head of sourcing - July 12, 2026
Every February, Tom and I pack the same battered cupping spoon, a notebook that is falling apart, and a grinder we trust more than any airline's checked baggage. The destination changes - this year it was the Gedeo zone in southern Ethiopia, the heart of the Yirgacheffe region - but the job is always the same: taste every lot we might buy, meet the people who grew it, and come home with coffee we can put our names on.
Yirgacheffe is where specialty coffee's reputation for florality was built. At 1,900 to 2,200 metres, the cherries ripen slowly and the washed lots carry that unmistakable signature - jasmine, bergamot, and a blueberry sweetness that tastes almost impossible for a seed to produce. But what makes the region special is not the altitude. It is the structure: most farms here are garden plots of a few thousand trees, tended by the same families for generations, and washed at shared stations where the water quality decides the cup.
Cupping at the station
We spent three days at the Halo Beriti washing station, cupping 40 lots alongside Ato Tadesse, who has run the station for 17 years. The protocol is the same everywhere: roast light, rest 8 hours, grind fresh, and let the coffee talk. Three of those 40 lots made it home. The rest failed on clarity, on body, or simply on not being interesting enough to justify the price we would need to pay.
That is the part people rarely hear about: direct trade means saying no more often than it means saying yes. We agreed to buy the two lots that are now on our shelf - one washed, one natural - at 3.4 times the commodity price, with a contract that pays the farmer directly and funds the station's next water treatment upgrade. When you buy the bag on our shop page, that is what the extra money pays for.
The tasting notes, translated
The natural lot is the one the team is calling “blueberry and honey” - it is sweet, syrupy, and forgiving in milk. The washed lot is the light roast we sell for filter: jasmine up front, a bergamot acidity, and a finish that goes on longer than it should. Both are in the shop now, roasted every Tuesday until they sell out. When they are gone, they are gone until next season - that is how fresh small-lot coffee works, and we would not have it any other way.
Maya Osei
Co-founder and head of sourcing at Velvet Bean. Maya has visited every origin we buy from, keeps the cupping scores in that notebook, and once carried 12kg of green coffee through Addis Ababa airport without declaring it (do not do this).
Daniel H.
Bought the natural lot after reading this - the blueberry note is real. Genuinely the best bag of coffee I have had this year.
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Rachel S.
Loved the detail on the water treatment upgrade - it is the kind of thing that never makes it into marketing. Thanks for writing this up.
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