Daye Bensa Coffee is the 2022 2nd Place Winner of the Ethiopia Cup of Excellence.
Brothers Asefa and Mulugeta Dukamo started the company with one small office and a single washing station, and the vision to uplift the lives of coffee farming families in their hometown, Daye Bensa, Sidama. While the natural environment at altitudes exceeding 2000 masl was conducive to growing high-quality coffee, enabling infrastructure to process and market it did not exist.
Together with his brother Mulugeta Dukamo, he would find a way to overcome this obstacle by setting up wet and dry mills at strategic locations and, not long after, their own exporting company. Now they have 71 washing stations, 11 dry mills, and three farms, with work in progress to expand to neighboring areas Guji, Bale, and West Arsi.
Rumudamo is a smaller district recently integrated into Daye Bensa’s network and from where they have produced lots that placed at 2nd, 3rd, and 8th in the 2020 Ethiopia Cup of Excellence.
It is situated in Arbegona, a larger district which made headlines in 2022, when a natural-processed 74158 variety from one of its villages ranked 1st in the COE.
The coffee-growing communities here are nestled among the highest elevations in Sidama Bensa, where the ideal conditions for cultivating coffee cherries of the highest quality coalesce.
Daye Bensa’s Rumudamo washing station services 600 smallholder farmers for whom coffee, the main source of livelihood, is grown alongside food crops like sugar cane, enset, spices, and other vegetables.
With the efforts of Daye Bensa Coffee to enhance this knowledge, Hamasho Village farmers are able to maintain and even raise their crops’ quality and commercial viability. Every 50-100 partner farmers regularly receive information about healthy cultivation practices from a dedicated contact.
Daye Bensa Coffee is one of Ethiopia's Top 5 Coffee Exporters. They supply 7,500 tons annually to 25 countries. Unlike others, they produce their own coffee on this massive scale and operate a relationship-based model with farmers, buyers, and other producers, allowing them to directly influence and improve their coffee's quality.
With Kenean Dukamo, Asefa’s son and second-generation leader, on-board, Daye Bensa looks to build on their COE win by creating a division focused on "intentional coffees.” They are also looking at creative collaborations with outside sectors like the arts or winemaking.
Archers x Daye Bensa
The Archers bond with Daye Bensa goes a long way back. It's also a connection marked by exhilarating milestones, such as: Archers’ first stint at the National Brewers Cup in 2021 where our co-founder and green buyer Frederick Bejo showcased a progressive rendering of Hamasho Village on-stage; our first creative processing collaboration that brought us exclusive Hamasho 192 Hrs and Gatta Warm Anaerobic Archers lots, our inaugural learning adventure at origin when we flew to Ethiopia for the CQI Q Processing 2 The Professional at Gatta Farm, Sidama Bensa, and that epic private cupping event featuring 20 cup profiles expressed by a single Ethiopian variety processed in 20 different ways.
