An Archive of Origins and Voice
The collection of the Coffee Commons cannot be found behind glass display cases or stored in climate-controlled vaults. Our collection is alive. It breathes with the forest undergrowth, resonates in the human voice, and carries the genetic memory of millennia. We are archivists of both the tangible and the intangible, safeguarding a heritage that is simultaneously botanical and biographical.
The Oral Archive: A Library of Voices. This is the intangible heart of our work. It is a meticulously curated and ever-growing repository of human experience centered around coffee. Our field archivists conduct respectful, long-form interviews with community elders, spiritual leaders, farmers, and coffee ceremony hostesses across Ethiopia's coffee lands. These are not simple Q&A sessions; they are collaborative recordings of folklore, harvest songs, parables, medicinal uses of the coffee leaf, and the spiritual significance of the buna ceremony. Each recording is professionally translated into English, transcribed, and tagged, creating a searchable database of knowledge that has, until now, existed only in memory. This digital archive serves as a permanent testament to the cultural ecosystem that gave coffee to the world, ensuring these foundational stories are accessible to scholars, descendants, and coffee lovers everywhere.
The Living Library: A Sanctuary of Biodiversity. This is our tangible collection, an ark for the future of Arabica. Located in the highlands, our research farm is a living library of coffee's genetic heritage. Here, we cultivate living specimens of Ethiopia's rarest and most vulnerable heirloom coffee varietals. Each plant is a living artifact, a direct link to the wild coffee forests where Coffea arabica first evolved. In partnership with the Ethiopian institutions, we identify, catalogue, and sequence these varietals, studying their unique flavour profiles and their natural resilience to climate change and disease. This is more than conservation for its own sake; it is a vital investment in the future of specialty coffee, ensuring that the incredible diversity of flavour that makes Ethiopian coffee so magical is not lost to the pressures of monoculture and a changing world.