Munyinya, Burundi

Origin

• 🇧🇮 Burundi

Tasting notes

Character

• Clean
  30

The tiny, landlocked country of Burundi is located right in the heart of Africa. Stretching up from the shores of Lake Tanganyika, a labyrinth of hills spreads in all directions, each hill a distinct community of small landholder farmers and their families. One of these hills, Munyinya, supports just over 700 farming families with its rich soils and favorable climate. Here, coffee is the single most important source of revenue for the community, and these farmers take their work incredibly seriously. Working together with the help of the Long Miles Coffee Project , the community of Munyinya grow their coffee with incredible care. Facilitating education, trained coffee agronomists work with teams of young, future coffee producers – the Coffee Scouts – teaching them about subjects ranging from fertilization and mulching to the benefits of proper cherry selection. Each scout selects two exemplary producer families from every hill to act as model farms – essentially neighborhood living classrooms. And then these two families in turn reach out to their neighbors, who then do similarly in an incredible example of grassroots education. The coffees from the farmers of Munyinya hill are all processed at the nearby Bukeye washing stationWashing stationA central mill where many smallholder farmers deliver cherry for processing. In Ethiopia, Kenya, and Rwanda the station name (e.g. Idido) often identifies the coffee. – itself run as a collective of farmers from Munyinya and 3 other distinct hill farming communities. There is a great deal of attention paid to quality here too, and for good reason. Farmers must have uncompromisingly high quality cherry to sell their coffee at the Bukeye station. Only fully ripe cherries are allowed, but in return, farmers are able to sell their coffee for almost twice the government-mandated coffee price, and the profits from sales to roasters like Ritual are returned back to the farmers in full at the end of the harvest season. When coffee arrives at the Bukeye washing station, all cherries are floated to check for insect damage and underdeveloped beans. A hand sorting, a.k.a. “Coffee Triage”, then takes place, where perfe