Alo Coffee

Alo Coffee is an Ethiopian producer and exporter based in the Sidama highlands.¹ It grows, processes and ships its own coffee, and — unusually for a producer of its size — runs its own annual online auction, Echoes of the Peak, where a lot sold for US$1,739 per kilogram in September 2025.²³

The name comes from Alo, a village in Bensa — the same woreda (district) that produced Basha Bekele’s record Cup of Excellence lot. That small corner of East Sidama now accounts for both the highest competition price and the highest private-auction price ever reported for Ethiopian coffee.

Role

• Farms, processes and exports. Alo controls the chain from cherry to container, which is what makes its lots traceable enough to auction individually. Most Ethiopian smallholder coffee is pooled at a station and loses its identity on the way out.
• Stations across two zones. By its own account Alo runs processing stations in Bensa, Bona and Burra (Sidama) and Nensebo (West Arsi).⁴
• Founded by a couple, not a company. Tamiru — a former teacher and engineer — co-founded Alo with his wife, Messi, after the 2020 Cup of Excellence competition showed them what Ethiopian coffee could fetch when it was judged on its own merits.
• Sells through its own auction. Echoes of the Peak runs on the M-Cultivo trading platform.⁵ Buyers named in coverage of the 2025 edition include INLIGHT Coffee, which paid US$495/kg for a Craft Reserves lot.²

How the coffee is made

Alo describes its house method as gentle shade drying followed by a slow finish in a “Light-Deprived Environment” (LDE) — drying the coffee out of direct light so it loses moisture slowly and keeps its aromatics. It offers four processing families: natural, washed, hybrid and anaerobic.

Its auction lots have been reported as variety 74158 — a selection bred by Ethiopia’s Jimma Agricultural Research Center — grown at 2,400–2,580 metres.²

The 2021 Cup of Excellence win — confirmed

Alo’s site says its first small lot, from Alo village in Bensa, “won Ethiopia’s Cup of Excellence in 2021”. The official Alliance for Coffee Excellence table backs it: Ethiopia ran a 2021 competition, and rank 1 was a Sidama coffee scoring 90.6 from a producer listed as “Tamiru Tadesse Tesema” — Alo’s founder, under his full name. The winning harvest was split in two:

	Lot	Score	Price	Total	Buyer
1	1a	90.6	$150.00/lb	$188,494.50	Saza Coffee, Sarutahiko Coffee Inc. and 7 others
2	1b	90.6	$140.20/lb	$176,179.50	PICK COFFEE, TUMAZ, L’escargot d’or and 2 others
3	5	90.1	$26.40/lb	$67,223.38	Sarutahiko Coffee Inc., Saza Coffee and 3 others

The same name also holds rank 5 in that auction. Alo village sits in Bensa, the district that supplies most of this wiki’s Ethiopian records. The COE sale ran on 7 July 2021 and totalled **1,803,557.95** across 56,151.62 lb, a 32.12/lb average.⁶

That settles two things previously flagged here: the founder’s full name is Tamiru Tadesse Tesema, and the interview claim of a first lot selling “around US330/kg" checks out — 150.00/lb is $330.69/kg.

The official Cup of Excellence results page adds the detail ACE’s auction table left out (, confirmed via WebFetch).⁷ Lots 1a and 1b were variety 74165, anaerobic, from Sidama, Bensa woreda — which confirms the interview’s claim that the winner was an anaerobic coffee. The rank-5 lot was 74158, natural, from the same woreda. Bensa placed five lots in that competition altogether; the full picture is on Bensa.

To verify

Which regions, and how many stations. A producer interview posted to YouTube gives a different map — around 13 stations spread across Bensa, Bona, Bora (Sidama), Guji and West Arsi — adding Guji, a zone Alo’s own site does not mention. The station count appears nowhere else. The official site’s list (Bensa, Bona, Burra, Nensebo) is treated as authoritative above.⁸

The remaining interview figures. The same interview claims the 2021 winner scored above 19 on the Cup of Excellence 20-point scale and that two lots together brought US420,000**. Official tables give the score only on the 100-point scale (90.6), and lots 1a and 1b together came to **364,674.00 — so the 20-point score and the $420,000 figure remain unmatched to the record. The interview’s “anaerobic” claim is now confirmed by the official results page; its “natural” wording is not, which lists the process simply as anaerobic.

Ownership and incorporation. No company registry record, incorporation date or ownership structure was found. “Alo Coffee” is a trading name in every source consulted.

Related

• Echoes of the Peak — the auction it runs
• Bensa — the woreda it grew out of, and its full record cluster
• Sidama — the region above it
• Basha Bekele — the other record-setting producer from Bensa
• Cup of Excellence · Cup of Excellence records by country
• Natural process — the processing family behind most Ethiopian record lots
• Daye Bensa — the older, much larger exporter in the same district, competing through the national COE instead
• Angelino’s Coffee · Saza Coffee — the kind of buyer these lots attract
• Premiumisation · Coffee scoring

Official links

• Official site — Alo Coffee
• Official site — Alo Coffee Auction (“Echoes of the Peak”)

Footnotes

1. Alo Coffee — company site ↩

2. Addis Insight — Ethiopian coffee hits $1,739 per kilo in record-breaking auction ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Global Coffee Report — Ethiopian coffee fetches record price at auction ↩

4. Alo Coffee Auction — about “Echoes of the Peak” ↩

5. M-Cultivo — auction events (lists Echoes of the Peak, hosted by Alo Coffee) ↩

6. Alliance for Coffee Excellence — Ethiopia 2021 results and auction ↩

7. Cup of Excellence — Ethiopia 2021 official results ↩

8. Alo Coffee — “Starting Strong in Ethiopian Coffee” (interview video) ↩