Coffees of Rwanda

Just five years ago, Rwanda did not exist in the specialty coffee world. Today, thanks to the funding of USAID, the vision of the PEARL Project and the inspired determination of the farmers, 20% of whom are genocide widows or orphans, new cooperatives are producing utterly unique boutique-quality coffees that are taking the specialty coffee sector by storm. Explore some of the coffee farms in Rwanda, including Karaba and Maraba.

Rwanda, Buf Coffee Mills

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Creamy milk and dark chocolate plus a touch of pecan laced with notes of red cherry and a trace of aromatic candied lemon.

Our 2008 crop scored 93 points in the Coffee Review. This new arrival is better. It is fresher, smoother and more nuanced.

Buf Coffee won three prizes in last year’s Cup of Excellence (the competition was not held this year but will, hopefully, resume next year)....

Buf Coffee is owned by Epiphanie Mukashyaka, a survivor of the 1994 Rwanda genocide and an inspiration to Rwandan women for her dynamic role in the development of specialty coffee. Our lot is a blend of coffees from two of her mills, a few dozen miles distant from each other, in the south-southwestern section of Rwanda. Both are on the eastern flank of a mountain chain dotted with tiny farms at between 5,250 feet and 6,250 feet in altitude that runs from Uganda in the north to Burundi in the south. The Nyarusiza mill is in Gikongoro province while Nkongoro is in adjoining Butare province. The soil in both areas is clay mixed with sand and rainfall is very moderate, averaging 55 inches per year. Strictly heirloom Bourbon coffee trees are grown. While I did not visit these mills when I visited Rwanda last August, I was in the region; click here to see my photographs, with comments, of the coffee-growing area around Butare.

Many hundreds of farmers sell their coffee cherry to the well-run Buf Coffee mills. A farmer typically has between 200 to 1000 coffee trees, each producing well under one pound of green coffee to be roasted (another minimum 15% weight loss). The mill depulps the coffee fruit, then removes all fruit residue still coating the beans by fermentation lasting about twenty four hours, then washes off all fruit and simultaneously separates the best, densest beans by use of turbulent water flow and gravity through concrete channels. The beans are finally soaked for another set of hours and then dried on raised racks over a period of about a week. This is painstaking work that must be done precisely to preserve the unique aromatics imparted to the coffee beans by that region's terroir.