Description
The Nyamasheke district of western Rwanda is blessed with exceptional terroir. The cool, humid climates of both Lake Kivu and Nyungwe Forest National Park keep groundwater abundant throughout this uniquely hilly region. Kivu itself is part of the East African Rift, whose steady drift creates volcanic seepage from the lake’s floor and enriches the surrounding volcanic-loam soils. Coffees from here are often jammier and heavier than those from the rest of the country, and Murundo’s lots in particular are full of complex sugars, currant-like acidity, blackberry and spice flavors, and round, soft textures. Produced by the Kivubelt group in western Rwanda, this fully washed Bourbon comes from the village of Cyiya in the Nyamasheke District, grown at roughly 1,700-1,900 masl and harvested between March and May. The lot is processed at the Jarama Coffee Washing Station (CWS), one of two sites the Kivubelt company operates. Cyiya is a small, high-elevation community with a distinct forest influence that lends the coffee great potential, and thanks to growers making the most of it, Cyiya’s coffee is annually among the top lots processed at the Jarama CWS. Kivubelt was established in 2011 by Furaha Umwizey, after he returned to Rwanda with a master’s degree in economics from Switzerland. Born and raised in Rwanda, Umwizey’s goal with Kivubelt is to create a model coffee plantation, as sustainable in agriculture as it is impactful in local employment and empowerment. The company began with 200 scattered acres of farmland in Gihombo, a community in Rwanda’s coffee-famous Nyamasheke district that runs along the breathtaking central shoreline of Lake Kivu.
Tasting Notes: A very fresh and tasty African coffee. Enjoyable at any roast level, though medium to dark was our favorite. Medium roast points provide a smooth cup on the nutty/chocolaty side, with sweet tea flavors and a hint of citric brightness; a little herbal spice lingers in the aftertaste, but very mild compared to most Africans. Darker roasts add complementing roasty notes, sweet burnt sugar, and a chocolaty cup jazzed up with a touch of spice, lower acidity, and a fuller body. You can take it lighter to boost the fruitier citric and floral tones, though it can be a pretty sharp cup right at first crack.
Roasting Notes: This coffee roasts well from light to dark. Push lighter if you want more fruity acidity, or darker if you want thicker, jazzy chocolate notes. Expect medium-to-low chaff and even roasting, but it can darken up a bit quickly in the roaster, so make sure you see the expansion in size if you’re shooting for a lighter roast point.
More on Kivubelt People Farm: Under Umwizey’s leadership, Kivubelt has planted 90,000 coffee trees on its estates, which now employ more than 400 people during harvest months and serve as a kind of coffee vocational school for local smallholders interested in improving their farming. Kivubelt has also acquired two washing stations, Murundo and Jarama, which together process coffee not only from the company’s own estates but also from more than 500 smallholders in the region, offering quality premiums and training programs for participating farming families. Coffee estates like Kivubelt’s are rare in Rwanda, where coffee was originally forced upon remote communities by the Belgians as a colony-funding cash crop. The Belgians distributed varieties the French had cultivated on Île de Bourbon (now Réunion Island, near Madagascar), but invested so little in coffee’s success that they let the sector decline through neglect of both infrastructure and the farmers who grew it. As a result, Rwandan coffee suffered near-total obscurity from the country’s independence in 1962 until the rebuilding that followed its devastating civil war and astonishingly tragic genocide in 1994. Rwanda’s former cash crop, however, would roar back to international buyer attention in the late 2000s thanks to one of East Africa’s most successful coffee interventions, the Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda Through Linkages (PEARL). PEARL was a sweeping infrastructure and education investment targeting large regions of Rwanda whose coffee was mostly processed poorly at home and exported with little traceability. The program, designed and led by the University of Michigan, Texas A&M and a host of Rwandan organizations, vastly increased processing hygiene by building washing stations and organized remote, under-resourced smallholders into cooperative businesses capable of specialty partnerships. Perhaps most significantly for the long term, it took the legacy Bourbon genetics buried in those abandoned farms and polished them anew, to the amazement of coffee drinkers everywhere. In the decade following PEARL and subsequent investments, Rwanda, one of the most rapidly modernizing countries on the continent, has built steadily on those first coffees, and we as buyers now have an awe-inspiring reference for how snappy, mouth-watering, and kaleidoscopic the Bourbon lineage can be. Kivubelt is one example of focused entrepreneurship aimed at a very specific landscape.
Jeffry Dana (verified owner) –
I like the flavor profile of this bean, however, even though there was hardly any chaff during the roast, there was a lot of large pieces of silver skin of the bean that comes out during the grind. If you don’t mind having flakes of silver skin, this is a good bean, if not, you might be disappointed. I will not order this bean in the future. I’m looking forward to when the Longberry Harrar is back in stock.
tralphaz (verified owner) –
I started roasting my own coffee after Costco stopped stocking my favorite, I had recently read that the coffee they discontinued was this particular bean, I roasted a batch of these beans well past first crack, dark, oily, I think I found what I was looking for, I’m using the new Gene Cafe CBR-301.