Tamiru Tadesse and Alo Coffee

Tamiru Tadesse is a former university lecturer and electrical engineer who worked in Ethiopian coffee for years before starting his own company. Ethiopia’s first Cup of Excellence in 2020 convinced him that quality could be recognised and paid for, and with his wife Messi he founded Alo Coffee that year. Their first entry, a lot from his home village of Alo in Bensa, won the Ethiopian Cup of Excellence in 2021.

Alo sits above 2,400 masl, high even for Sidama, and Tamiru chose it as his main processing site. The variety is JARC 74158, a selection from Ethiopia’s Jimma Agricultural Research Center that is widely planted in the south. Tanat began buying Tamiru’s coffees in 2024 and says it was the first roaster to bring them to Europe.

What mosto means

Mosto is the juice pressed from crushed coffee cherries, collected as a by-product of pulping. It is rich in sugars, and adding it to a sealed tank of whole cherries gives the fermentation more to work with. For this lot the cherries spend 96 hours in airtight tanks with mosto, then dry as a natural, still inside the fruit. The result is a cup built around pineapple and lacto-fermented strawberry, a long way from the jasmine and citrus of a classic washed Sidama.

About Tanat

Tanat is a specialty roaster in Paris that started in 2016 as Kawa Coffee, supplying cafés and restaurants, and now sells under its own name through its shop and online store as well. Co-founder Alexis Gagnaire placed third at the 2019 World AeroPress Championship. Tanat sources directly from farms, producers and cooperatives it has worked with over several years, and roasts separate profiles for filter and espresso. This lot is roasted light, for filter.

Brewing it

Heavily fermented naturals extract easily, and pushed too far they can taste boozy. A slightly coarser grind than you would use for a washed coffee and water around 92°C is a sensible start, with 15 g of coffee to 250 g of water finishing around 2:45. A single-dose grinder such as the Option-O Lagom Mini 2 makes it easy to move the grind in small steps between brews. For a contrast from the same roaster, brew it next to the washed Gathaithi AA; the two sit at opposite ends of what filter coffee can taste like.

Tamiru talks about starting Alo Coffee in the video below.

Coffee details