How We Travel · 06 of 06
Follow the bean home
Coffee forest walks, and a ceremony done properly
Coffee is part of daily life everywhere in Ethiopia, and in the north it grows closer than most visitors expect — under the trees of Lake Tana's Zege Peninsula, where shaded trails link the monasteries through a working coffee forest.
On the Zege Peninsula, the coffee forest is the landscape itself: paths wind under the canopy between the monasteries, past the red cherries of trees that local families still harvest. It is an easy half-day on foot, reached by boat from Bahir Dar.
Then comes the ceremony, done the way it is at home rather than in a hotel lobby: green beans roasted over coals in front of you, ground by hand, brewed in a clay jebena and poured in three rounds — abol, tona and baraka, the last meaning blessing. It takes the better part of an hour, and nobody hurries it.
For guests who want to go further, wild Arabica still grows in the forests of Kaffa in the south-west, where the plant is thought to have originated — an extension we can add to any northern journey.
What this looks like
- 01A walk through Zege's coffee forest between Lake Tana's monasteries
- 02A full three-round coffee ceremony in a family home
- 03The chance to buy beans directly from the household that roasted them
- 04An optional extension to the wild coffee forests of Kaffa
- Typical setting
- Zege Peninsula, Lake Tana
- Time needed
- Half a day, minimum
- Extension
- Kaffa forests
- Season
- Year-round
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