If you are going to order coffee at one of the little stands (and you'll recognize them because they have a little charcoal fire going, a woman sitting in front of it and a circle of wooden stools in front of her - sorry no photos) you need to know that getting coffee is going to take a long time. Of course if you go to one of those stands at a tourist hotel or at the airport it will not take that long. But if you do the right thing this is how it goes:
The woman takes green coffee beans and roast them on a metal plate on the charcoals (fabulous smell!) then while she pounds the beans with a wooden pestle she boils water in the coffee pot (a traditional pottery pot) on the same charcoals. At this stage she often puts some frankincense on the charcoals. All this is a slow process. Once the coffee is a fine powder she puts the powder into the water and you wait some more until the coffee is done. Whenever the pot shows steam (and so must be just about to boil) the woman making the coffee just take the pot off the charcoals for a while, then puts it back on. Typically about half an hour later you can drink a small cup of very strong (typically sweetened) coffee. Delicious!
One day I hired a local cab and went for a drive to the outskirts of Addis and found a local potter.
This is the coffee pots, and coffee cups I bought. (a detail of the photo above) and the grass you see in the photo above is what we used to pack around the pottery so it would break during transport.
One trivial but interesting thing about coffee in Ethiopia is that since Ethiopia was briefly colonized by the italians. Italy's relationship to coffee (strong small cups of espresso) is really an Ethiopian thing. The coffee you drink in the process I described above is very strong and drank in small cups not unlike little espresso cups.
