Mensur Abahika (Ethiopia)

This is our first coffee offering from Mensur Abahika, a pioneer in Jimma’s shift toward washed processing. Expect bright peach notes upfront, with a definitive black tea character, and delicate honeysuckle florality. Clean citrus and honey sweetness rounds it out beautifully.

Mensur became the first independent producer in Ethiopia that Osito Coffee purchased from during the 2019/2020 harvest. He remains a central figure in the Tokuma Farmer Group, a collective in western Ethiopia where farmers collaborate to market their coffees and share knowledge about quality improvements. Since Osito began working with Tokuma, cup quality and consistency have increased every year, and coffees are moving to port more efficiently. Mensur is vital to the group’s success and to Osito’s work with single producers in the Jimma region.

Jimma was long associated with low-quality naturals, but that changed in 2009 when the economic development NGO TechnoServe partnered with local co-ops to introduce wet-processing mills and raise standards. Since then, Jimma has become recognized as one of Ethiopia’s premier coffee regions. Washed coffees (which require more infrastructure and carry more risk) have typically been the domain of co-ops and private stations, while small and mid-sized farms focused on naturals. That shifted in the 2022/2023 harvest, when several Tokuma producers, including Mensur, began producing washed coffees.

This washed lot was processed with meticulous care. Mensur pulps his coffee cherries, along with those of his wife and a few other Tokuma producers, at the washing station on his farm. Pre-separation tanks remove floaters and lower-density cherries. The coffee is fermented for approximately 24-36 hours, then thoroughly washed in grading channels. They move the in-parchment coffee beans to skin-drying tables for hand sorting and picking, then transfer them to raised drying beds where they rest for about 12-14 days. During drying, farmers carefully cover the coffee beans during rainfall and the hottest parts of the day to protect quality. Once the in-parchment coffee beans reach a target moisture level of 10.5%, they are sealed in hermetic bags for storage. The Jimma Agricultural Research Center (JARC) selected the varieties featured here, 74110 and 74112, for breeding to optimize disease resistance; they are now among the most widely grown in the country.