How to read an Ethiopian coffee bag: heirloom, 74110, Kurume, Wolisho

An Ethiopian bag gives you a region, a process, an altitude and a variety. Three of those four are useful. The variety line is usually the word heirloom, and it is doing much less work than it looks like it is doing.

"Heirloom" is a category, not a variety

Nordic Approach, the importer, sets out what the term covers: a broad range of native varieties in two groups — selections improved by the Jimma Agricultural Research Centre, and regional landraces, which are wild, mixed coffee trees. Outside the JARC types there is no comprehensive formal classification system for Ethiopian coffee varieties at all.

There is also a practical reason the label stays vague. Most Ethiopian coffee comes from washing stations buying cherry from hundreds of smallholders, growing mixed and unidentified strains. Adham Yonis, Nordic Approach's Ethiopia country manager, puts it directly:

So heirloom on a bag is not a roaster being lazy. In most cases it is the most accurate thing they can print. What it does mean is that when a bag is specific instead, that specificity is worth reading.

The numbers: 74110 and 74112

When a bag gives you a number instead of heirloom, it is naming a JARC selection. 74110 is a locally selected sub-variety developed at the Jimma Agricultural Research Center for resistance to coffee berry disease, and the 74 prefix is the selection year, 1974. It was selected from an original mother tree in Bishari village, in the Oromia region; the trees are short and compact, with small leaves and cherries (Sample Coffee Roasters). 74112 is a related JARC selection.

One distinction matters here and is often lost. JARC selections are selections from Ethiopia's own native genetic diversity, chosen for disease resistance together with cup quality — not crosses with Robusta, as hybrids developed elsewhere often are (Keffa Coffee). Sweet Maria's notes that these improved varieties can have excellent cup quality when planted in the correct zone, and associates 74110 with the Sidama area.

Practical consequence: a number on the bag tells you the lot was kept separate far enough back in the chain that someone knew what was in it. That is a signal about traceability as much as about flavour.

The names: Kurume and Wolisho

These two are landraces, not JARC selections, and their names come from the Yirgacheffe and Gedeo vocabulary. Kurume is described as a smaller-bean landrace identified in the Yirgacheffe area, sweet in the cup and highly aromatic. Wolisho takes its name from a tree indigenous to the Gedeo area around Yirgacheffe, and has large cherries and long leaves (Kurume Bean Coffee). Coffee Hero puts the shorthand plainly: Kurume beans are very small and hard, Wolisho beans are bigger. Inheritance Coffee gives Wolisho's preferred band as 1,900–2,200 m.

Is the region name a place or a trademark?

Both, in a way that is worth knowing. In 2004 and 2005 the Ethiopian government, through the Ethiopian Intellectual Property Office and the Ethiopian Fine Coffee Stakeholder Committee, launched an initiative to trademark the names Harrar, Sidamo and Yirgacheffe. It chose trademark rather than geographical indication because GI certification was judged impractical with roughly 600,000 independent smallholders farming over four million small plots (WIPO).

Yirgacheffe was the first of the three to obtain US trademark registration. The US National Coffee Association formally opposed the Harrar and Sidamo applications, arguing the names were too generic, which began a dispute lasting years and taking in Starbucks' use of Sidamo branding (WIPO). So when a bag says Yirgacheffe, it is naming a growing area and a protected commercial name at once.

The umbrella term also flattens real differences. A 2022 genetic diversity study in Agronomy sampling Coffea arabica across Ethiopia and Yemen found large, continuous diversity in Ethiopian cultivated coffee and identified a distinct Harrar genetic cluster making up 74% of coffee sampled in the Hararghe region. Under one word on a label there is measurable, regionally structured distinctiveness.

Gap in our sourcing: we found no single named source that settles whether Guji, Yirgacheffe and Sidama on retail bags function as administrative zones, grading designations or trademarks in one unified definition. The trademark facts above are WIPO's; we have not extrapolated a taxonomy beyond them.

What to do with this at the shop page

Read the lines in this order: process first, because it moves the cup most; then altitude and harvest date, because freshness and density are real; then the region; and the variety line last, because unless it carries a number or a landrace name it is telling you the lot is mixed. That order will not tell you whether the bag is good. It will tell you whether the roaster knows what they are selling.