Origin Story
This special microlot was produced using coffee cherry from 75 women farmers who own and grow coffee on small farms in the hills surrounding Nkara washing station, in Rwanda’s Northern Province.
The picturesque Nkara is Dukunde Kawa Cooperative’s smallest and most remote washing station. Sitting in a valley at 1,880 meters above sea level, the site overlooks a beautiful landscape of rolling green hills dotted with farms and forests.
Unlike most coffee-producing countries, where land size is used as a measure of scale, farms in Rwanda are often very small, and production capability is determined by the number of trees a farmer tends to. The majority of producers who contribute to the Nkara washing station own a couple of hundred trees, planted on one tenth of a hectare of land, along with subsistence food crops like maize, beans and sorghum and livestock like cows, goats and chickens.
Processing
The team at Dukunde Kawa takes a huge amount of care in processing its coffee. All members of the cooperative are trained to only select ripe coffee cherries from their trees.
On delivery, the cherries are inspected and sorted by hand to ensure only the very ripest cherries are processed. Farmers do the selecting, and receive the highest income from the ripest, healthier fruit. The remainder of their crop still gets purchased by the co-op, at a lower price, to be processed and sold for the internal market.
Cherry is then sorted by weight using a Pinhalense machine, with any floaters are removed. By using a machine, rather than a clerk, Dukunde Kawa are more transparent with contributing growers about which fruit gets processed. Coffee is then pulped using a mechanical pulper that divides the beans into three grades by weight, with the heaviest, A1, usually having the highest cup quality.
After pulping, the coffee is pre-washed, graded again using floatation channels that sort the coffee by weight, and left to ferment overnight for around 12–18 hours. The following day, wet parchment is the washed a second time and left to ferment for a further six hours — with the goal of removing as much mucilage as possible without using machinery that may accidentally crush or damage the beans.
As with most washing stations in Rwanda, women do the majority of hand-sorting. This takes place in two stages – on the covered pre-drying tables and on the drying tables. Washed beans are moved from the wet fermentation tanks onto the pre-drying tables, where they are intensively ‘wet sorted’ under shade for four hours. The idea is that greens (unripe beans) are still visible when the beans are damp, while the roofs over the tables protect the beans from the direct sunlight.
Next, the beans are moved onto the washing station’s raised drying tables for around two weeks, where they are sorted again for defects, turned regularly and protected from rain and the midday sun by covers, ensuring both even drying and the removal of any damaged or defective beans. During this period the coffee is also turned several times a day by hand to ensure the coffee dries evenly and consistently.
