Daye Bensa's Station Network: Why Keramo Matters

Daye Bensa Coffee Export PLC operates 71 washing stations across Sidama and neighbouring regions — each one a specific terroir expression, community partnership, and processing protocol. The Keramo station is one of these 71 nodes, serving a farming community in the Sidama highlands and contributing its lot to the mosaic of Daye Bensa's diverse offering. While Rumudamo (Blog #65) achieved global fame through its 2020 CoE placements and Shantawene (Blog #71) carries the cachet of the new 2019-built wet mill, Keramo represents the consistent quality that Daye Bensa's station network produces across all its sites — less celebrated individually but no less excellent.

Brothers Asefa and Mulugeta Dukamo founded the company in 1996 with the mission of transforming Sidama coffee from commodity to specialty. Over nearly three decades, they have built the infrastructure, trained the farming communities, invested in second payments, and developed the farmer relationships that make every lot in their network traceable to a specific community and processing protocol. Keramo is the product of that long-term investment.

Sidama: Ethiopia's Most Productive Specialty Zone

Sidama Zone covers a large area of southern Ethiopia with altitudes ranging from 1,500 to 2,400 metres, diverse microclimates shaped by the Great Rift Valley escarpment, and a farming tradition that predates written history. Coffee grows here as both planted cultivation and semi-wild forest coffee, producing a diversity of cup profiles that no other Ethiopian zone can match. The Gedeo Zone (Yirgacheffe) is more famous internationally, but Sidama produces more specialty volume and has the deeper network of quality-focused stations and exporters. Daye Bensa, with its 71 stations, is the most important single company in that story.

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