Rwanda Origin Trip 2023

In early June, our co-founder Jon and roastery manager Alex travelled to Rwanda with our import partner DRWakefield, to see where our coffee comes from. It turned into a week spent with the farmers, cooperatives and communities behind Rwandan coffee.

Kigali

The trip started with a visit to the genocide memorial in Kigali. It's part of the country's history, and it gave context to the stories the group heard later in the trip. (For more on how this history connects with the coffee industry, see our origin focus piece on Rwanda's coffee history.)

Kinini and the Village of New Beginnings

East of Kigali, the group met Jacquie and Malcolm, the founders of Kinini Coffee. Jacquie's family came from the village of Musenyi, and she started the project to address the poverty, poor schooling and limited healthcare she saw there. Malcolm, from the UK, met Jacquie through her late husband and helped raise the funds and build the partnerships needed to get it going.

The drive east passed through market towns, with banana plantations and rice paddies still wet from the rainy season.

At the village, known as A New Beginning, the group was welcomed by Jacquie's brother John, headmaster of the school, and by singing from local children. The site includes classrooms, football pitches and a medical centre, funded through Malcolm's fundraising and DRWakefield's support, which has put over $25,000 into the community since 2018.

There was also a group of school children waiting for their arrival who sang songs for them all.

The group was then shown round the grounds, seeing the classrooms and football fields and also the medical and first aid centre.

One of the more useful projects has been a borehole, which now provides clean drinking water to the village and surrounding areas. Before it existed, water had to be boiled or drawn from a reservoir contaminated by cattle, a factor in the spread of malaria, the country's deadliest disease. The health centre next to it serves around 25,000 people; before it was built, the nearest treatment meant a 20km walk. There's also a community hall, used for weddings and funerals.

Meeting the Farmers

South of Kigali, at around 1,540 metres, the group visited a farm run by a local grower. 

As a child he had severe malnutrition, which left him with lasting health problems, but he's now one of the more respected and productive farmers in the region.

Inside the Kinini Washing Station

A day at the Kinini washing station, where our own Rwandan beans come from, covered the process that turns raw cherry into exportable coffee. Built in 2015, the station gives local farmers access to the specialty market, with micro-financing that lets families keep their income for things like school fees.

The washing station was built in 2015, this provided farmers with access to the speciality market by having a place where their coffee can go through processing before being sold into the wider markets. Kinini also have the option of micro financing for the farmers to keep their money for the kids to take to school. 

It was a very interesting day out to see how the cherries are processed before becoming the final product that we roast in our roastery down at Brunswick Dock, Liverpool.

Coffee is brought from the farms over to the Kinini washing station to go through either wet or dry processes before being ready to be sold on. You can read more about various coffee processes on our 'What is Coffee Processing?' blog post.

Young coffee saplings are grown here and too co cooperatives to be grown into full trees. It normally takes about 3-4 years for any coffee tree to produce any fruit.

Once picked, the coffee cherry has to go through processes to remove the layers surrounding the bean. There are many layers before you get to the good stuff inside. These are; skin, fruit, mucilage and parchment. All coffee gets fermented, but the length of time for the fermentation varies for each different process. Fermentation will even begin as soon as a coffee is picked due to the presence of water, sugar, bacteria, and yeast.

Wet processing: ripe cherries pass through a depulper, which separates the fruit from the bean. The bean still carries the mucilage, a sticky, sugar-rich layer that affects flavour, and is left to ferment in water over several days.

Natural processing is the oldest method, typically used where water is scarce. The whole fruit is dried intact rather than removed, so the bean takes in some of the fruit's sugars and characteristics. Before drying, the cherries are floated and sorted, by hand or machine, to remove anything unripe.

The pulp from processing isn't wasted; it's fed to a worm farm, where it's turned into fertiliser over about 45 days and used on the same trees it came from.

The visit ended in the cupping lab, where coffee is tasted and scored for cleanliness, sweetness, acidity, mouthfeel and aftertaste, the standard way quality is judged.

The Women of KCRS

North of Kigali, in the Rulindo region, the group met the KCRS Cooperative, a group of women farmers, many of them widowed or orphaned during the 1994 genocide, who now own land that was previously left unclear. They're closely linked to the Kinini washing station, both through processing their cherries and their relationship with Jacquie.

When the women approached Jacquie for help, she guided them through forming a registered cooperative, split into twelve local groups for training and travel, and arranged for their coffee to be sold under the cooperative's own name.

Jon and Alex said meeting these women was one of the more memorable parts of the trip. Alongside coffee, the farms also grow legumes, beans and sweet potatoes, which help with income and food supply through the year.

Ekawa Cooperative and Drying

At the Towner Ekawa Cooperative, the focus was washed coffee and wet fermentation. Raised drying beds, common across African coffee-growing regions, keep cherries off the ground and let air circulate underneath, which produces more evenly dried beans.

From here, coffee goes through quality control: sorted by hand to separate specialty-grade beans from the rest, then checked with a moisture meter until it reaches around 10% moisture. Five kilograms of freshly picked cherry produces around one kilogram after processing, dropping to about 800 grams once dried, and finishing at 500 to 600 grams of roasted coffee. That's roughly how much goes into every 60kg bag that arrives at our roastery in Liverpool.

The group ended the day with a walk further into the farmland.

NAEB

The final stop was the National Agricultural Export Development Board (NAEB), a government-run export centre, where the group returned to the cupping lab for further assessment. It's a large warehouse employing around 1,000 people across storage, sorting, grading and bagging, and it's where Rwanda's coffee is split into two tiers.

'Ordinary coffee' is typically naturally processed on the farm rather than at a washing station, skips the stricter quality control, and is generally sold into commodity markets at lower prices. 'Specialty coffee' goes through a washing station and stricter grading, usually scoring in the high 80s to 90s on the SCA scale, and sells for more as a result.

Journey's End

With the research done, the final day was a safari before the flight home, a chance to see a different side of the country after a week spent mostly on farms and in processing stations.

Jon and Alex said the trip gave them a much better understanding of the people, the land and the work behind every cup of Rwandan coffee we roast. It's one thing to read about washing stations, cooperatives and grading systems, and another to stand in a cupping lab or walk a farm with the people who grow the coffee. That understanding feeds into how we buy and talk about this coffee going forward, and into the relationships we're building with Kinini and the cooperatives who supply it.