Hambela

Tagel Alemayehu grew up in Bule Hora, Guji, so coffee has always been in his life. His father was a local coffee trader, who built the first washing station in the village and pushed for more professionalism in the sector, installing better equipment in the stations and dry mills in the area. Tagel pushed forward with this work in his own professional life, managing one of the first stations producing speciality natural coffee in Guji from 2004. Tagel’s work in Guji led to many of those iconic blueberry jam-like cups that opened many of our eyes to naturally processed coffees all those years ago.

In the intervening years, Tagel worked his way around the coffee industry, working with several different export and producing companies, alongside a stint as a professional racing driver. in 2018, he founded Olkai Coffee in response to the opening of Ethiopian export regions, for the first owning the whole supply chain, from cherry to export. Tagel now operates 6 stations in the south of Yirgacheffe and over the border into Guji, in some of the regions which promise to produce excellent quality now and in the future. Some of these regions weren’t viable for coffee until recently; climate change is pushing the ideal conditions for coffee higher and higher in altitude.