Munyinya, Burundi

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 station – 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 perfectly ripe cherries are sorted from any that have blemishes.

This particular lot was selected for its even ripeness and incredible fruit flavor to be processed as a washed coffee. After removing the tough skin from the coffee fruit, the beans -still covered in sweet, sticky fruit- are fermented in concrete tanks overnight. The following day, the coffee is washed in clean water and separated for density and quality in long channels of flowing water. Drying takes place over a period of 2-3 weeks on raised beds, where the beans, still in parchment, are monitored closely and constantly moved to keep the process slow and even. Once fully dried, the coffee is taken to be milled, where the clean tight parchment is removed from the fresh green beans, which then are immediately sorted, bagged, and taken to port.