Haile & Dimbelal | Ethiopia

Featuring boozy fruit cake, anyone? Packed with concentrated fruit sweetness, immensely satisfying and perfect to round off a long lunch/dinner.

Moredocofe in 2002 - it stands for ‘Mora Mora River Valley Development Organic Coffee’. They own two farms and a washing station under the Moredocofe umbrella, and also work with 300 smallholders (or ‘out-growers’ as they are commonly referred to in Ethiopia) to produce high quality, organic coffee.

Moredocofe is run by Haile Gebre and his family. In total they own around 500 hectares of land in Shakiso—which is very unusual in Ethiopia—and have planted 420 hectares with semi-forest coffee. Haile is passionate about many things and cares deeply about the environment; to this end he has dedicated 70 hectares to pure forest, and taken a very careful and considered approach to farming coffee.

In addition to their farm, Moredocofe is also dedicated to working with small producers to produce exceptional quality coffee, and to face the challenges of a delicate ecosystem, poor farming education, and limited access to quality and sustainability initiatives by addressing these issues front on.

Haile is passionate about development and growth on many levels. He believes very enthusiastically that his success can only come from the success of his local community in Shakiso, his out-growers, and his customers. He has many social programs in place to help develop his local community. For example, he has a nursery for propagating coffee seedlings, and he has made this large enough to share coffee seedlings with all of his out-growers free of charge. He sees this as an incentive for his local community to continue to plant and rejuvenate their coffee plantations, and also an incentive for them to grow. Haile has also provided the farming community with extensive education on cherry selection, harvesting, and best agricultural practices. He has a sample roaster and gives producers the opportunity to cup their coffees and better understand the feedback around taste.

Haile has also helped build a primary school for his local community, providing care and education to the children of his out-grower partners.

Haile is also passionate about organic farming and believes that this is the only truly sustainable way to produce coffee. One of his core beliefs is that what you take out of the earth—like fruit from the trees—you should put back into the earth in equal measure. To achieve this Haile has a program to compost organic material, including the pulp from coffee cherries, and encourages his out-grower partners to follow this program also.

Responsibly sourced by the excellent team at Melbourne Coffee Merchants.