I'm leaving for Ethiopia in about a week, to help put together a couple of really exciting projects. I'll talk more about those projects here, to be sure, but for today I just wanted to share this amazing, amazing map.
You can click on the map to enlarge it, or you can click here to make it REALLY large.
This map, made in 1972, is available online from the European Digital Archive of Soil Maps. It shows the different base rock types for the different areas of Ethiopia. (This map also includes Eritrea in the north, which is now an independent country.)
Cross-referencing with a cleaner political map, one can find the soil types for the different coffee producing areas. Let's take a couple of famous coffee towns. There's none more famous that Yergacheffe. That's due east of Lake Abaya, the foot-shaped lake in the central-southwest part of the country. According to the map, the soil there, marked with an orange wedge surrounded by yellow and green, is in the Volcanic Rock group (no surprise there); the "Trap Series" subgroup; is from the Paleocene-Oligocene-Miocene eras; and is composed primarily of Alkali olivine basalt and tuffs, and rare rhyolites. That's a lot of information.
What about Harar? Look in the central eastern part of the map, due south of the "French Territory of the Affars and Issas" (now the nation of Djbouti). There's a thick band of yellow, and just south of that a crenellated, complicated area of pink, purple, lavender and orange. This is where Harar is, and the town itself is a purple region, built on sandstone and shale from the Triassic-Liassic period. Totally different.
I don't know enough about soil to tell you exactly what all this means. I remember my junior high geology — and I know a thing or two about how soil types affect coffee, but to my knowledge no one has really broken this down much further than volcanic vs non-volcanic, except on the agronomical level — certainly not taste-wise anything other than anecdotally on the tongues of master cuppers. But you can make some broad assumptions based on information like this, and I look forward to the time when better records are kept (by people like yours truly) and when we can start gathering and collating some serious data on soil types and flavor profiles.
But more than the science, what first caught me about this map was the beauty. It captures what Ethiopia is to me, a land of incredible natural and cultural diversity. As far as coffee producing countries go, there's nowhere else like Ethiopia, and there never will be. The flavors there are as diverse as the micro-regions on this map. There are about 70 languages spoken there. There are thousands upon thousands of different coffee tree varietals, as opposed to the 6 or 8 you might find in a Latin American country. Processing can vary widely from place to place. It's a bit dizzying, occasionally frustrating, and always rewarding.
I don't mean to suggest that Ethiopia is the only place with complex growing conditions. Take a look at any other geological map of this type (here's a beautiful one of Colombia, for example (big file warning again), and you will see a similar rainbow (though not often in the same shattered-glass patterns as you see in this map). For me, this map is just a symbol of all the incredible variety that Ethiopia has to offer. A visual representation of the way the country truly is. Almost like... like a map. Ha.
I'm looking forward to tasting this coffee in its original birthplace again very soon, to meeting with and breaking bread with the people who grow it and drink it, and to sharing about it with all of you here. Stay tuned.
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