Coffee didn't start as an industry. It started as a ceremony, a medicine, a conversation between neighbours, a gift passed from hand to hand across centuries.
Then came the global trade. The scales, the grades, the commodities exchanges. The beans kept moving. The stories stopped.
An entire knowledge system. Ceremonies, songs, farming wisdom, oral histories. All quietly erased. Not destroyed. Just… forgotten.
But some knowledge survived.
Not in books or archives. In the memories of elders. In the rhythms of harvest songs. In the hands of farmers who still practised the old ways. Not because anyone asked them to, but because they believed it mattered.
In the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, where the first wild coffee trees grew, one man decided that believing wasn't enough.
For 38 years, Solomon has been doing something no one else thought to do. Walking through the Kaffa forests, sitting with elders, recording the ceremonies, the songs, the farming wisdom, the oral histories that the global coffee trade had quietly left behind.
Not as an academic exercise. Because the work needed doing and no one else was doing it.
He recorded ceremonies that hadn't been documented in any language. He catalogued wild coffee varieties that no botanist had named. He mapped the mother trees, the ancient specimens that seed the forest floor, not for commerce, but because once they're gone, they're gone.
“The ceremonies are disappearing. My grandmother's ceremony had fourteen steps. When I recorded my neighbour's last year, there were six.”
Solomon Tekle
Solomon's work existed long before Band of Beans.
He wasn't waiting to be discovered. He wasn't building a portfolio or looking for partners. He was doing the work because the work needed doing. For nearly four decades he funded it himself, pursued it through political upheaval and economic hardship, kept going when no one was paying attention.
That independence is the reason everything you read from here isn't a marketing story. It's a life's work that we were invited into.
February 2025. We were in Ethiopia for the first time, following the question that had started everything.
We met producers, attended ceremonies, tasted coffee at its source. And everywhere we went in Kaffa, we kept hearing the same name. Solomon. The man who recorded everything. The one who'd been listening when no one else was.
We didn't meet him then. But the name stayed with us.
Back in London, two months later, we were sitting across from him.
April 2025. A first meeting. We talked for hours. About Kaffa, about ceremony, about what had been lost and what he'd managed to preserve. We left thinking: that's one of the most extraordinary people we've ever met.
Then in June, Solomon invited us to the Ethiopian Embassy coffee symposium in London. That invitation changed everything. He wasn't joining our world. He was opening the door to his.
By August, Solomon had joined Band of Beans. By November, he was our co-founder. Not because we recruited him. Because the relationship had grown into something that couldn't be anything else.
Seven months. Each step led to the next, the way the whole adventure has worked from the beginning. You follow the question. The question introduces you to the people you were always going to find.
Solomon's 38 years of documentation are becoming a living library. Not a museum, not a static archive. A growing collection of ceremonies, oral histories, botanical knowledge, and farming wisdom, brought together in one place for the first time.
Every coffee we sell carries a thread of this knowledge. Every story we tell is informed by his decades of patient listening. Every relationship we build with producers follows the kind of respect he practised long before we arrived.
We're not going to pretend we've built this yet. The library is in its early stages. Solomon's archive is vast, and organising a lifetime of field research takes time. But the foundation is 38 years deep, and that's not something you can rush or replicate.
What makes Band of Beans different isn't better sourcing or prettier packaging. It's that we have a co-founder who spent 38 years building relationships with the people and places where coffee began.
That kind of knowledge doesn't come from a supply chain audit. It comes from showing up, every year, for a lifetime.
Solomon is going home. With us. To the forests where his work began, the communities he's spent 38 years listening to, the mother trees he mapped before anyone thought to ask.
We don't know yet what we'll find. That's the point.
Follow the Adventure
Field notes, producer stories, and cultural discoveries from wherever the road takes us.
