Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony Explained: The Roast, the Jebena and the Three Rounds

What happens in an Ethiopian coffee ceremony: green beans roasted and pounded by hand, coffee boiled in a clay jebena, three rounds called abol, tona and baraka, and how it varies across the country.

By Jay Arr Updated

In Ethiopia, the everyday phrase for getting together to talk is buna tetu, which literally means “drinking coffee.” Jeff Koehler, whose Where the Wild Coffee Grows describes ceremonies he attended in Sidamo and Kafa, says that captures both sides of it: a meeting rarely lacks coffee, and coffee rarely lacks company. Drinking coffee there, he writes, is rarely done alone. Or quickly.

The anthropologist Alula Pankhurst, quoted by Koehler, calls coffee “a symbol of sociability, a metaphor for social relations and a vehicle for spiritual blessings.” It is also a lot of coffee: USDA forecasts that Ethiopians will drink 5.0 million 60 kg bags of the country’s 12.1 million-bag crop in 2026/27, about 41 percent of it (calculated). A popular saying, buna dabo naw, puts it more simply: “coffee is our bread.”

This page describes the ceremony from those firsthand accounts and from the anthropologist Sarah Howard’s fieldwork in eastern Amhara. Ethiopia has some 80 ethnic groups and several religions, so read it as a common outline, not one fixed ritual.

What happens, step by step

Koehler writes that the ritual is so prescribed that a ceremony he watched in Sidamo “could have been nearly anywhere in Ethiopia,” and that appreciation comes from seeing each expected step done well. Howard describes an “ideal-typical” ceremony, and notes that even casual daily coffee includes most of it.

Every step is something to watch, smell or hear. A man at the Sidamo ceremony told Koehler that where he lives, coffee is “for all five senses,” and that satisfying them all takes time: “Half hour, one hour. More.”

The jebena

Koehler calls the jebena, a bulbous, long-necked clay pot, the most important of the ceremony’s tools. The one he watched in Sidamo was darkened black to a high polish, with a short, pointed spout. Because it has no filter, the host lets the grounds settle and pours gently, in one continuous stream, so they stay in the pot. In Howard’s account, boiling, settling, tasting and perhaps boiling again or adding hot water are all part of the host’s skill, and young girls check with older women how to proceed.

Not every jebena has a spout. In Mankira, in Kafa, Koehler was told about the “original style,” which is less bulbous, with a long, narrow neck and no spout. Ingredients go in and coffee comes out through the same opening. Butter is a common ingredient there, and a woman in Mankira explained that the butter floating on top only comes out with the coffee if the pot has that single opening.

Boiling finely ground coffee and pouring it off the settled grounds is close to the idea behind Turkish coffee, which our Turkish coffee guide covers.

The three rounds: abol, tona and baraka

The same grounds make all three rounds; the host just adds water to the jebena each time. Koehler writes that, like tea in the Sahara, the coffee comes in three rounds, each a touch weaker. Each round has a name, though spellings vary in English:

Boot also records a legend, told by the anthropologist Jacques Mercier, in which the rounds take their names from three men, Abol, Atona and Baraka, who learned to brew coffee on a religious retreat.

How the ceremony varies

Who serves. In Howard’s fieldwork, the coffee was almost always prepared by women, who were expected to offer the first round to men in order of age, then to women and children. She saw some give in these roles in private among young government workers, but writes that at a ceremony marking an occasion in public, it would be unthinkable. When the Austrian visitor Friedrich Bieber watched coffee being made in Kafa in 1905, it was women who prepared it, fresh before each meal.

What goes in. Koehler writes that in parts of Ethiopia, wild cardamom or a clove is sometimes pounded with the beans, or, near the Sudan border, a curl of cinnamon bark; in Kafa, the addition, if any, is fresh wild ginger. Bieber noted that people in Kafa who liked it spiced added grains of paradise or a pinch of cloves. In Howard’s description, “optional spices of choice” are pounded with the beans, and a sugar bowl sits with the cups.

Butter and honey in Kafa. In the 1920s, the German explorer Max Grühl drank Kafa coffee “made with butter, honey and spices.” His guide described roasting the beans, grinding them to a fine powder, mixing it with a little butter and honey into tiny balls, and boiling those in the coffee pot. The guide added that coffee was often made without butter and honey in the “Habesho” (Ethiopian) way, “but that is not Kafa coffee.” Bieber, two decades earlier, saw coffee pounded, mixed with wild honey, rolled into balls and dropped into boiling water.

Coffee to carry. The same roasted, ground coffee, rolled into balls with honey or butter, made portable food for journeys. The Scottish traveler James Bruce described butter-and-coffee balls in the 18th century; Koehler calls them “essentially early energy bars.”

Leaves, not beans. In the east, around Harar and Dire Dawa, Koehler found people drinking kuti, an infusion of toasted coffee leaves. In Kafa, a more complex leaf infusion called chamo can include wild garlic, ginger, rue and chilies.

What’s eaten with it. Popcorn or roasted grain is traditional, and Howard notes that cheap biscuits often stand in. At the Sidamo ceremony, kocho, a bread made from fermented enset, went around too, and the man who told Koehler about the five senses listed injera as well. He called it a special meal, “not lunch or dinner, but a coffee ceremony meal.” Our sister site has more on injera and Ethiopian bread.

Where it happens. In homes, first of all, but not only there. Koehler’s first cup in Kafa came from a woman preparing coffee in a restaurant in Bonga, in what he calls the shortened version. Howard’s account centers on young government workers sharing coffee among themselves, and Koehler saw women prepare coffee in large jebenas for a community celebration.

Where the ceremony comes from

Arabica coffee grows wild in the forests of southwestern Ethiopia, and Koehler argues that the people living there were very likely the first to brew it, though no one wrote it down. Kafa, the kingdom that ruled those forests until Ethiopia conquered it in 1897, traced its line of kings back to 1390 in its own oral history. Its language had no script until the 1990s, so its coffee customs were passed on by telling.

The early written accounts are travelers’. Alexander Bulatovich, crossing Kafa in 1898, found people drinking coffee “several times a day,” boiled in earthenware and poured into little cups of ox horn. Horn cups can still be found there, Koehler notes, though many people now use small handleless ceramic cups.

Coffee wasn’t always welcome everywhere in Ethiopia. Koehler writes that in the north, Orthodox Christians at first saw it as a Muslim drink and objected to it, but that the prejudice died away in the second half of the 19th century, and coffee became the national drink and a staple. Today, he writes, many consider the ceremony the most important part of their culture, one that binds a population of 80 ethnic groups.

The Kaldi legend. You’ve probably read about Kaldi, the goatherd whose goats danced after eating coffee berries. It’s a legend. Koehler traces it to a Latin treatise on coffee published in 1671 by Antoine Faustus Nairon, a professor in Rome, and notes that the French scholar Antoine Galland criticized Nairon almost at once for accepting, or even inventing, the story. Versions told in Kafa itself are different: the herder is called Kali Adu or Kalliti, the king of Mankira takes the place of the monks, and people came to the drink gradually, eating the berries and brewing the leaves before they brewed the beans.

The earliest written records of coffee as a drink come from Yemen in the 15th century, where it then became a farmed crop. Our Yemen coffee guide tells that part of the story.

If you’re invited

Koehler’s accounts suggest a few things. Showing appreciation is expected: when the host carries the roasted beans around, take in the smell. Stay for the third round, since leaving before baraka is considered rude. And in Kafa, at least, you may not need much of an invitation: Mesfin Tekle told Koehler that if you smell coffee being made, there’s nothing strange about walking in for a cup, because there will always be extra.

For the coffees themselves, see our guides to Ethiopian coffee flavors and varieties and Ethiopian heirloom vs. named varieties.

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