Queen City Coffee - Yirgacheffe Fosan Ethiopia (12oz.)
About The Product: This (12oz.) bag of coffee reminds us of sugar cookies and lemon cookies. Mickias (Micki) Alamirew emigrated from Ethiopia to the Denver metro in the late '90s. As the city has grown, so too has the diaspora where now more than 35,000 Ethiopians call the city home. This vibrant community maintains many Ethiopian traditions, including at-home coffee ceremonies with friends and family. With so many Ethiopians needing raw coffee to roast for these ceremonies, Micki saw an opportunity to import coffee from back home and sell it to his community in Denver. So, Micki and his wife Mercy started Lucy Coffee to invest in Fosan, a small yet carefully managed 3.5-acre farm and washing station in Yirgacheffe, the famous coffee-growing area in Ethiopia's southern Gedeo Zone. We met Micki around this time as he sought feedback from local commercial roasters about the quality of the coffee he was importing. Needless to say, we were blown away. The coffees from Fosan are a remarkable expression of its high-elevation terroir, grown at an altitude of 2,100+ meters above sea level. Purchasing cherry from neighboring smallholders as well as growing their own, coffees at Fosan are processed using both traditional washed and raised-bed natural methods, allowing the unique floral, citrus, and stone fruit characteristics of Yirgacheffe coffee to shine.
About The Company: We believe that honest relationships, from farmers to consumers, achieve an equitable and sustainable coffee supply chain. In many ways, Queen City started in the mid-2000s while we worked, researched, and played in rural Africa. From Zimbabwe to Rwanda, we spent nearly a decade coordinating humanitarian programs, organizing research projects, and kicking around on humble soccer fields with friends. We learned about community in Africa — real, honest community.
Life eventually brought us back to our roots, back to Colorado and the great city of Denver. Along the way, we indulged our passion for coffee by moonlighting as baristas and roasters, and this made our next project an easy progression — we love our farmer friends + we love our city, the Queen City of the Plains + we love coffee — so we started a company that combines all these things!
Collective coffee means we’re doing this together — we have real, tangible connection with our coffee farmers; we know the conditions of their production; we then small-batch roast their coffee in the city we love and we proudly serve it in Denver’s historic Baker neighborhood. We believe everyone is welcome to this ragtag group because good coffee should build the collective good.
