We would like to introduce you to our only Rwanda this year. We love the coffees from Rwanda and Burundi at our roastery and we are sure you will enjoy this coffee too.
The coffee came to us from a private washing station called Gitesi. Owned and operated by father and son Alexis and Aime Gahizi. The station was built in 2005 and is located in the Western Province of Rwanda. In the early years Alexis and Aime struggled to keep the station running and fought hard to make it a profitable business. They finally managed to turn a profit in 2010 and since then Gitesi Washing Station has been a business with a sustainable future. Alexis is from the Karongi district where Gitesi is located and his family has been growing coffee in the region for generations. Gitesi has very strong relationships with farmers in the local community – there are over 1,800 coffee growers who supply their beans here. Alexis and Aime have also introduced bonus rewards for farmers to motivate them to focus more on quality in their cultivation. This allows the station to sell the coffee at higher prices and then redistribute more of the profits to the farmers who contributed. Aime has an engineering background and has designed and implemented a very complex water purification system at his station. So much so that it is being used as a model for future water purification systems for wash stations in the area. Gitesi also has its own land on which it grows coffee and plans to expand it. As Aime explained, this is both to directly control and manage the quality of production and to ensure supply.
Our baristas notes:
A juicy, sweet espresso with citric acidity. Notes of red orange dominate on the body which transform to grapefruit on longer extraction. There are also very pleasant notes of cardamom and butterscotch on the body. On longer extractions there is a very pleasant black tea smell on the finish. In the milk the black tea notes are dominant in all extractions. At the same time you can also find sweet notes of honey or peeled almonds. The coffee came out best at a ratio of 1 : 2.12 at times between 28 and 32 seconds.
