An Editorial · Chapter N° 001
An account of the land where coffee was born, the farmers who keep it, and the slow work of sending a bean the long way home.
Ethiopia is where coffee first opened its eyes — in the shaded understory of the Kaffa forests, where a wild shrub bore a fruit sweet enough to startle a goatherd. A thousand years later, the same hills still carry the same plant, tended in a rhythm that predates every argument we've had about it.
Our work begins there. We source exclusively from smallholder farmers in Yirgacheffe, Sidamo, and Guji — people whose family plots rarely exceed a few hectares, and whose patience is the first ingredient in every cup we send. No blends sold as singles. No badges we haven’t earned. Certified Grade 1, and the grade is on the bag.
What you taste — the bergamot lift of a Yirgacheffe, the wine-dark body of a Sidamo, the high-altitude fruit and florals of a Guji — is the signature of a place, written in a language only the bean can speak. Our job is to listen carefully and translate without losing anything on the way.
We don't call them values. Values drift. These are written obligations — the things every bag we send is bound to.
Grown the way these highlands have always grown coffee — under native shade, on smallholder plots, dried whole in the sun. We claim no organic certificate we have not earned; we claim the grade on the paperwork.
We buy the top grade, and the top grade earns the top price in the Ethiopian export market. No certification logos, no invented percentages — just the lot, the grade, and a receipt we can stand behind.
Every bag carries the farm it came from. Every roast date is stamped and verifiable. No blends sold as singles. If a claim isn’t on the bag, it isn’t on the shelf.
Only the top classification enters our bench — beans of uniform size, near-zero defects, and a cupping score above 85. If a lot slips below the line, it doesn’t get a label. It doesn’t get sold.
Every bag names its origin, its grade, its process, and its roast date. If we can’t put a claim on the label and back it with paperwork, it doesn’t go on the website either.
Who runs this
LIYYU COFFEE is Frezer Kifle’s. The coffee is roasted in Ethiopia at origin and imported by Liyyu Coffee LLC in Mount Joy, Pennsylvania — the US distributor, not the roaster. Bags are labelled, weighed and posted by hand from Mount Joy. Orders nearby can be hand-delivered — that is a real option at checkout, not a marketing line.
The reason the range is three coffees rather than thirty is that one person can taste and stand behind three. Every bag carries the roast date because we know it; every product page names the origin, the altitude band, the process and the grade because we can.
If something is wrong with your order, you are writing to the person who packed it. Email admin@liyyucoffee.com or telephone +1 (717) 928-3545 — and see what we do and do not claim for the limits of what we can prove about the supply chain.
Every bag you buy keeps a highland plot in the hands that have tended it for generations. That’s the whole business. The coffee — the coffee is what we make together.