Etiopien Suke Quto Espresso

Suke Quto is the very essence of Guji coffee. The owner Tesfaye Bekele was one of the first to distinguish the coffee from the Guji region, as he thought it had a unique character of its own. So in many ways, his coffees are the flagship of the Guji coffee flavor.

Tesfaye Bekele is widely recognized as one of the pioneers who helped put Guji specialty coffee on the global map. At a time when the Guji zone was primarily known for cattle farming, he envisioned a different future—one rooted in coffee. “I don’t consider myself just a coffee farmer; coffee is everything to me,” says Tesfaye Bekele, founder of Suke Quto Farm. “All my time and energy go into the beans I grow and process.”

Tesfaye began his career in Natural Resource and Environmental Protection with the Ethiopian government, overseeing the Guji and Borena zones—then a single administrative region. Between 1997 and 1999, Guji was devastated by massive bushfires that scorched over 5,000 acres of forest, leaving communities in crisis and searching for answers. In the aftermath, many locals returned to the scorched land and converted it into farmland, planting crops like teff and maize. As a dedicated government official, Tesfaye understood their need to rebuild their lives—but he also recognized the environmental risks of unchecked land conversion. “I knew I couldn’t simply stop them from using the land,” he explains. “So I had to offer an alternative. That alternative was a bold vision: reforest the area while integrating coffee cultivation to promote biodiversity and long-term sustainability. The community embraced his idea and asked him to supply the coffee seedlings—marking the beginning of a transformation that would change Guji’s landscape and future.

Tesfaye Bekele founded the Suke Quto farm in 2005 with five hectares planted with coffee trees, all in a natural forest environment. The farm now has 221 hectares of coffee, and over 170 other family farms supply their coffee cherries to the farm for processing. The coffee is grown 100% naturally; the coffee trees are nourished from a combination of leaf litter, shade tree & coffee tree residues and pulp. The process can be described as almost completely circular, from seedlings to trees to pulp and pruning to ground cover and back to the trees again.