Welcome to the March 2025 edition of For the Love of Coffee! A blog about all things coffee exclusively for the employees of Vienna Coffee.
Our Spotlight Coffee for the month of March will be our award-winning single-origin gem - Ethiopian Shantawene.
As many of you already know, coffee was first discovered in Ethiopia in the mid-9th century, and some of the world’s best coffee is still grown there! Shantawene Village is located in the Bensa District of Sidama, Ethiopia. This natural lot is a collection of coffees from the village, produced at the local mill run by the Dukamo Family. In 2006, brothers Asefa and Mulugeta Dukamo founded Daye Bensa, a coffee grower and exporter in Ethiopia.
Daye Bensa exports coffee from its farm in the Shantawene Village and from “out-growers”(or smallholders) in Shantawene, Karamo, and Bombe. The farm is located at the heart of Shantawene Village amid natural forest and indigenous trees estimated to be more than 200 years old. Daye Bensa has quickly become the area’s leader in high-quality coffee, winning numerous accolades, including 7th place at the inaugural 2020 Cup of Excellence competition for Ethiopia.
Surrounded by rivers separating Shantawene from Bombe, the dry mill maintains natural shade trees and the fertility of the soil with the help of expertise from the Ethiopian Ministry of Agriculture.
This beautiful coffee is processed using the Natural Process. In the natural process, the coffee beans are left in the red, cherry-like coffee fruit to dry on raised beds. Each lot is carefully hand-sorted to remove any unripe cherries before going to the de-pulper to remove the outer fruit layer of the coffee. This process results in the wonderful fruit-forward essence of the coffee cherry in the cup, as well as additional sweetness and body.
Here at Vienna Coffee, we roast the green coffee beans to a light roast degree to highlight all the natural dark fruit notes, medium body, and bright, fruity acidity. Tasting notes for this outstanding single-origin Ethiopian coffee are Raspberry, Plumb, and Lavender.
This coffee also won a Bronze Medal for Veinna at the 2022 Golden Bean Awards, a national coffee-roasting competition. The coffee won the award in the “Pour Over Filter” category. We will be sure to have something in the cafe pointing to this fact and encourage customers to try the coffee prepared using the pour over method.
I hope you all take pride in knowing that every single day you are serving our customers only the highest quality coffees, sourced from farms that take great pride in their product and care deeply about their workers and the natural environment. Take the opportunity this month to try this truly outstanding coffee and please share your thoughts, I would love to hear them!
It’s a GREAT day for coffee!
~Matt~