This is the coffee that won us Gold. We entered it as Candy Cloud Espresso in the 2026 Global Coffee Awards, where every cup is judged blind. It took Gold for Single Origin Experimental Espresso and Bronze in Experimental Flat White. Those two medals were part of how we became the Overall National Winner for Canada.
It comes from Morkie, a village in Burra in the Sidama region. Morkie is the smallest station Alo Coffee runs. Small is the point: tiny volumes, picked and processed with a level of care that big stations cannot match.
Alo Coffee is Tamiru Tadesse and his wife, Messi. Tamiru was an electrical engineer and a university teacher before coffee, and he spent years watching Bensa coffee get undervalued. Ethiopia’s first Cup of Excellence in 2020 convinced him to start his own company. Their very first submission won first place in 2021. They have not slowed down since.
I spent a lot of time with the Alo team on my trip to Ethiopia this past season. I practically lived in their cupping lab, working through table after table of their coffees. Tamiru is the real deal. He cares deeply about quality. He is not a businessman in coffee, he is a coffee guy in business, and you can taste that difference in everything they produce.
Now let’s talk about the coffee. Anaerobic means without oxygen. Ripe cherries are selected and sealed whole in barrels for 72 hours, then spread out to dry in the sun for 15 to 25 days. The variety is 74158, a selection from the Jimma Agricultural Research Center (JARC) in Ethiopia.
We only bought three 30 kg bags, and they came over by air. That was enough for two weeks of Candy Cloud in August, and for the competition. The judges found grape, blueberry, peach, jasmine and black tea, with a juicy, syrupy body. In their words: “A wonderful and vibrant espresso.” We could not agree more!
