Country
Ethiopia
Ethiopia is a coffee country that also grows tea, and almost nobody outside it knows. Two plantations in the southwestern highlands, Gumaro and Wush Wush, make nearly all of it, and nearly all of what they make is drunk inside Ethiopia rather than exported. That makes it the odd one out in African tea: everywhere else on the continent the industry was built to fill someone else's teapot, and here it was built to catch up with a domestic demand that imports had been meeting.
What grows here
Black tea, essentially only. Gumaro sits near Gore in the Illubabor area of western Oromia and is the older of the two. Wush Wush is in the Kaffa highlands to the south, in the forest belt of southwestern Ethiopia. Chewaka, planted in 1995, is the later third estate. A few hundred smallholders around Gumaro and Wush Wush grow leaf on their own plots and sell it to the estates. The same forests grow coffee, and the two crops compete for the same ground and the same labour.
The ground
The southwestern highlands, the wettest and most forested part of Ethiopia and the region botanists treat as the home range of wild arabica coffee. Montane forest, heavy rain and acidic soils. The constraint on Ethiopian tea has never been the ground: the agriculture ministry's own line is that there is far more suitable land than planted area and that opening it would mean either moving farmers or clearing forest.
The bushes
Assamica planting stock brought in from established tea countries. This is worth stating plainly, because Ethiopia is the origin of coffee and it is easy to assume the same of tea. Camellia sinensis is not native here and there is no Ethiopian landrace standing behind these estates.
How it is made here
Black tea on estate lines, made for the domestic packing trade rather than for export grading. Around ten packing companies buy from the estates and blend, bag and sell into Ethiopian shops, which is where most of the country's tea ends its journey. The share that does leave goes partly through the Mombasa auction and partly on direct contracts.
What to look for
Two traps, and the first is the big one. Wush Wush is now far better known as the name of a coffee variety than as a tea estate, so a bag labelled Wush Wush is much more likely to be coffee than tea: same place, different plant. The second is that spiced Ethiopian-style tea is a preparation rather than an origin, and it is not necessarily made from Ethiopian leaf. Ethiopian Camellia sinensis is real, small and only exported in quantity since the 2010s, so wide availability is a reason to ask rather than a reassurance.
How it got here
Large-scale planting began in 1928 near Gore in Illubabor, and the estate was making and selling tea under the Gumaro name from 1957. Wush Wush was added later. Both were state-owned under the Derg and were sold in 2000 to EthioAgri-CEFT, part of the MIDROC group, which still runs them. Chewaka had been established separately in 1995. Ethiopia imported tea from Kenya and China until it could meet its own demand, and it only became a meaningful exporter in the 2010s.
Places in Ethiopia
Named places inside Ethiopia. The ones with a page of their own are links.