Our Story · Eyakem Gulilat
I went to make a film. I came back with a harvest.
I was born in Ethiopia and I make pictures for a living. For two years, as a Tulsa Artist Fellow, I had been working with coffee as a lived, relational material — performing the ceremony in galleries, churches and living rooms across the United States, sitting with people I would never otherwise have met. At one of those ceremonies I met Evan Clayburg, and the collaboration became a film. Then the film took me home for the first time in nearly forty years, up Unchu Mountain in the old Kaffa country where Arabica began, to a farm run by a woman named Bezuayehu Shone. I expected a story about land and inheritance. What I found was five hundred acres of forest coffee, a clinic, a school, and a hundred seasonal pickers who treat the harvest as a shared meal rather than a crop.
When I asked why they grow coffee instead of anything more profitable, a woman on the drying beds answered without looking up: coffee is our bread. That sentence is the company. Midrib buys this farm's coffee directly, pays above the gate price, and names the people who picked it. The film is still being made. The coffee is ready now.
About the founder
Eyakem Gulilat.
Eyakem Gulilat is an Ethiopian American artist, photographer, and founder of Midrib Coffee. Born in Ethiopia and based in Oklahoma, his work has long explored place, belonging, migration, and the ways people create community.
Coffee has been a constant throughout Eyakem's life. In recent years, he has returned to the Ethiopian coffee ceremony as both an artistic method and a way of reconnecting with the knowledge, hospitality, and traditions that shaped him. That journey eventually brought him closer to the source—spending time with coffee growers in Ethiopia and developing a direct relationship with Shone Coffee Farm in the Jimma region.
He founded Midrib Coffee to bring those relationships together. Midrib is an extension of Eyakem's creative practice: connecting farmer, place, story, and cup while building a more direct relationship between the people who grow coffee and the people who drink it.
For Eyakem, coffee is more than a product. It is a way of remembering where he comes from, creating space for others, and finding belonging.
ቡና ዳቦ ነው
Coffee is our bread.
A highland proverb. On the farm it is said plainly, the way you would say the rent is due.
The Farm
Where the coffee actually comes from.
Shone Coffee Farm on Mount Unchu — the land, the people who pick it, and the community around it.
The Film
Sacred Grounds.
The documentary this company grew out of — three lives, one harvest, and a ceremony carried across two countries.