The Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony: Buna, and Why It Takes an Hour

Ethiopia is where arabica comes from, and the ceremony built around it, buna, is the oldest continuously practised coffee ritual anywhere. It takes somewhere between one and two hours, it is performed several times a week in many households, and almost nothing about it is decorative.

What happens, in order

• The space is prepared. Fresh grass is scattered on the floor and incense is lit. Both are still burning when the coffee is served, and the smell of the room is treated as part of the drink.
• Green beans are washed and roasted. In a flat pan over coals, in front of everyone, until they darken and crack. The pan is then carried around so each guest can draw the smoke toward them.
• The beans are ground by hand, traditionally with a mortar and a heavy pestle, coarse by any modern standard.
• The grounds are boiled in a jebena, a round clay pot with a long neck. It comes to the boil more than once.
• It is poured from a height into small handleless cups, in one continuous motion across all of them, so that everyone gets the same strength.

The three rounds

The same grounds are brewed three times and each round has a name: abol, tona and baraka. Each is weaker than the one before.

Baraka means blessing, and it is the round the whole thing is aimed at. Leaving after the first cup is not a neutral act. The ceremony is a structure for keeping people in a room together for an hour, and the three rounds are the mechanism that does it.

Why the pot is shaped like that

The jebena is a filter with no filter in it. The wide belly gives the grounds somewhere to settle, the long neck keeps them there when the pot is tipped, and the spout draws from the clear liquid above. Unglazed clay also holds heat and softens the boil rather than driving it.

It solves the problem every unfiltered method has, and it solves it with geometry, which is why the design has not needed to change.

What it tells you about the coffee

Ethiopian coffees are known for floral and citrus notes and a light body, and the ceremony roasts them well past the point a modern speciality roaster would stop. Those two facts sit oddly together until you notice that the ceremony is not trying to isolate the flavour of a particular lot. It is making coffee for a room, from whatever is in the house, several times a week.

The pursuit of a single origin's distinct character is a recent idea and a commercial one. Buna is older than the market that produced it.

If you are offered one

Accept, and plan to stay. Say yes to all three rounds. Do not check the time. The hospitality being offered is the hour, and the coffee is how it is measured out.

What to do if you are a guest

The etiquette is simple and mostly consists of not being in a hurry.

• Accept all three rounds. Leaving before baraka is the one genuine misstep.
• Take the pan when it comes round. Waft the smoke toward yourself. It is an invitation and refusing it is odd.
• Expect sugar, often a lot of it, and in some regions salt or butter instead. Asking for it plain is fine; being surprised at the table is less so.
• Do not rush the host. The roasting is not a delay before the coffee. It is the occasion.

Popcorn or roasted barley is commonly served alongside, and it is not a snack added for children. It is part of the format.

The jebena against everything else

It is worth seeing where this method sits among the unfiltered brewers, because it solves the same problem three different cultures solved three different ways.

• Jebena. Settles the grounds using the shape of the vessel and pours clear from a high spout. Coarse grind, long boil.
• Cezve. Serves the grounds along with the coffee and lets them settle in the cup instead. The finest grind in coffee. See Turkish sand coffee.
• French press. Uses a mesh, which is the modern answer. See French press.

All three are immersion methods and none of them uses paper, which is why all three produce a heavier cup than a pour over. The oils that paper removes stay in.

Buying the coffee for it

Ethiopian beans are widely available and the ceremony is not fussy about which, since it roasts them itself. If you are brewing in a jebena at home rather than performing the whole thing, a washed Ethiopian coffee at a medium roast is the easiest starting point, and our coffee reviews cover what is worth buying.

What you should not do is buy an expensive light-roast micro-lot for it. The method boils the coffee for several minutes and then does it twice more. The delicacy you paid for will not survive the first round.