A living museum of African coffee: its people, places, and plants.
About Coffee Commons
About Us
What We Do
What We Do
Coffee is more than a beverage; it is ceremony, ecology, language, and livelihood. Coffee Commons is a non-profit museum dedicated to stewarding the origins of coffee, especially Ethiopia and Africa, through ethical Collection, rigorous Preservation & Research, and vibrant Exhibition & Education on-site and online.
What We Do
What We Do
What We Do
Collection: We collect objects, archives, stories, and scientific materials with community consent and clear provenance.
Preservation & Research: We protect what we hold in trust and advance knowledge across botany, history, health, and culture.
Exhibition & Education: We share collections through exhibitions, public programmes, online lectures, and youth animations.
Our Mission
What We Do
Our Mission
We’re not documenting a commodity; we’re preserving a biography. For centuries, coffee’s story has been told through trade and fashion. We centre origin communities where coffee lives in ceremony and landscape, and we make that knowledge open, equitable, and evidence-based.
Exhibitions
Upcoming Permanent Exhibition – Origins: Coffee and the Commons
A multi-sensory journey from Ethiopia’s forests to today’s cafés, weaving botany, ceremony, language, and livelihoods.
Galleries - Forest & Plant: Wild Arabica, varietals, terroir, and ecology. Ceremony & Sound: Buna ritual, storytelling, song, and scent. Trade & Power: Routes, empires, labour, and ethics across centuries. Futures: Climate change, genetics, equitable value chains, and repair.
Temporary Exhibitions (Rotating)
Gesha: From Bench Maji to the World—Origins, naming, and the global journey.
The Hands that Harvest—Invisible labour, visible skill across regions and seasons.
Buna & Baraka—Coffee, devotion, and community across faiths and festivals.
Online Exhibitions
Immersive microsites with 3D objects, annotated audio, and classroom packs, free to access worldwide.
Offline (Travelling) Exhibition
Immersive microsites with 3D objects, annotated audio, and classroom packs, free to access worldwide.