Rwanda Mudada Mbilima Light Roast
A Celebration of traditional African coffee, smooth bright and complex the journey of this cup will take your senses through a mini rollercoaster with a hit of lemon at the beginning flowing through to a gentle sweet honey mellowing out with chocolate.
This Coffee is best enjoyed as filter.
The Musasa Dukunde Kawa cooperative has three washing stations lying high in Rwanda’s rugged northwest.Mbilima– the cooperative’s secondwashing station-was built by the co-op in 2005 with profits earned from their first washing station, Ruli, constructed only two years prior constructed at a vertiginous 2,020 metres above sea level, it is one of Rwanda’s highest washing stations. Much of the success of Musasa Dukunde Kawa can be attributed to thetransformational PEARL programme of which it was a part. The projects witched the focus in the Rwandan coffee sector from an historic emphasis on quantity to oneof quality, thus opening Rwanda up to the much more highly-valued specialty coffee market.
The programme and its successor, SPREAD, have been invaluable in helping Rwanda’s small-scale coffee farmers to rebuild their production inthe wake of the devastating 1994 genocide and the 1990s world coffee crash.
Most of the small scale producers with whom Musasa Dukunde Kawaworks own less than a quarter of a hectare ofland, where they cultivate an average of only 250-300 coffee trees each as well as other subsistence food crops such as maize and beans. The cooperative gives these small farmers the chance to combine their harvests and process cherries centrally. Before the proliferation of washing stations such as Mibilima, the norm in Rwanda was for small farmers to sell semi-processed cherries on to a middleman, and the market was dominated by a single exporter.
This commodity-focused system-coupled with declining world prices in the 1990s-brought severe hardship to farmers, some of whom abandoned coffee entirely. Today, it’s a different picture. Farmers who work with Musasa Dukunde Kawa have seen their income at least double,and the co-op produces some outstanding lots for the specialty market year after year. ‘Musasa’ means ‘a place to make a bed’ and ‘Dukunde Kawa’ means ‘let’s love coffee’ in Kinyarwanda-a reference to the power of coffee toimprove the livesof those in rural communities. Musasa Dukunde Kawa now owns three washing stations and is one of Rwanda’s larger cooperatives, with 2,148membersas of the 2014/15 crop year. Mibilima washing stationb egan serving local farmers in 2006 and today buys and processes cherries from just under a quarter of the cooperative’s membership.
The numbers and paperwork involved are substantial! All of this is overseen by Wet Mill Manager, Jon Bosco Habimana, who has held the postsince 2012. Under his directionand the assistance of 4 permanent staff and 67 seasonal workers, Mibilima has grown to process 2 containers of exportable coffee, of which we select the finest.
