Meghan Winkler
Nardos Street was about 10 years old and living in Ethiopia the first time she performed an Ethiopian coffee ceremony, which involves washing and roasting beans before grinding and brewing them and serving coffee to guests.
“In that part of the world, you’re a firstborn, it’s like, You gotta learn quick,” says Street, who moved to the United States in 2004. She performs coffee ceremonies ($40 per person, including food) at events through Akron-based Bereka Coffee, which opened in 2016, and plans to open a shop.
Ethiopia is the birthplace of coffee, so coffee holds great cultural significance both as the resource that makes up about two-thirds of the country’s earnings, according to Bereka, and as an opportunity to connect with family and neighbors over an hour or two.
“It is a means of community bonding and therapeutic experience for a lot of people in Ethiopia,” she says. “People really make an intentional decision to carve time in the evening just to sit around a coffee ceremony.”
Bereka also has a coffee trailer that Street and her husband started in 2022 to attend events, serving espresso drinks and bites like Ethiopian honey bread, but the coffee ceremonies are Street’s favorite part. “It is reconnecting me back to home,” she says.
When she performs a Bereka coffee ceremony, she rotates between organic Ethiopian beans from different regions — Sidama produces coffee that is crisp and citrusy, Guji creates smooth, chocolatey notes and Yirgacheffee produces a very light coffee. For the ceremony that lasts a few hours, she wears traditional Ethiopian dress, washes beans, roasts them in a pan and invites guests to take in aromas. She grinds beans with a mortar and brews coffee in a clay pot. She lights incense and encourages conversation as everyone sips cups of coffee and eats Ethiopian food. She performs at least one public ceremony monthly, with one at the Tudor House March 20.
She loves educating people about Ethiopian culture. She has made an impact — customers have told her that she inspired them to visit Ethiopia and experience the coffee culture there firsthand.
“Coffee is one of the biggest consumed beverages in the world, but very little people know the history behind it,” Street says. “To talk about some of the contributions Ethiopia had has made me feel like I’m an ambassador.”
