Little Grain Huakui Coffee Beans

Ethiopia is often likened to the gene bank of Arabica, which many people find hard to understand. But actually, the comparison is quite fitting—most Ethiopian coffee varieties are named after their original landrace types. Drinking Ethiopian beans is like opening a mystery box—you never know when you might discover a uniquely flavored bean that gets isolated for cultivation.

As mentioned earlier, people were enjoying delicious coffee when one day they suddenly noticed a particular and stable flavor profile within the Huakui beans. That unique flavor was then isolated from the rest, giving rise to what we now know as its own distinguished line. But how exactly did this come about? It all started with the 2017 TOH competition.

The English name for Huakui coffee is “Hambella,” which translates literally to “Hambella.” However, in the Chinese market, its name is Huakui—there’s no obvious connection between “Hambella” and “Huakui.” The reason ties back to TOH. Originally, this bean was an unnamed variety, but in 2017, an Ethiopian green coffee exporter, DW Company, submitted this coffee to the TOH (Taste of Harvest) competition organized by the African Fine Coffees Association. A natural lot from the Buku Abel processing plant won the TOH Ethiopia championship with its intense strawberry and cream aroma. This bean is the one literally translated as “Hambella.” In the same year, a Beijing-based green coffee trader imported this particular lot. Quite interestingly, barista Li Jianfei used this coffee to compete in the 2017 China Coffee Championship. With this bean, he stood out among numerous Geisha entrants and won second place. Keep in mind, almost all the coffees used in that year’s competition were Geisha varieties, so the fact that a non-Geisha bean defeated the reigning favorite was incredibly significant. Moreover, because the English word “Geisha” sounds like the Japanese word for “geisha” (female entertainer), to highlight the status of this coffee, it was named “Huakui,” meaning “the queen of geishas.” This is the origin of the name Huakui.

Therefore, in the narrow sense, only the 2017 TOH natural-process champion that was imported into China can be called Huakui coffee. But due to its excellent flavor, the Beijing green coffee trading company Hongshun has continued to import beans from the “Buku Abel” processing plant in the Hambella region every year, labeling them as Huakui 2.0, Huakui 3.0, Huakui 3.1, etc., to distinguish them from the original Huakui coffee and to represent different batches or harvest seasons. By 2021, the latest Huakui 5.0 had been released. In addition to Huakui 5.0, there is also a series called Little Grain Huakui. Unlike the X.0 series, Little Grain Huakui is not updated yearly. In fact, Front Street Coffee selected small-grain beans from Huakui 2.0 and 3.1 and found that they possessed the strawberry flavor of the original 2017 Huakui. This led to the belief that the unique aroma and sweetness of Huakui mainly come from these small-grain beans. In batch 4.0, some lots also had a higher proportion of small grains, and those batches exhibited particularly excellent aroma and sweetness.

To sum up, Huakui refers specifically to coffee beans processed by the “Buku Abel” plant in the Hambella region, imported after 2017. Little Grain Huakui, on the other hand, refers to the small-grain beans selected from these, which carry the strawberry flavor reminiscent of the original 2017 Huakui. Of course, as an agricultural product, coffee’s flavor varies slightly from year to year due to climate changes.