Burundi Kayanza Red Fruit Coffee

A washed coffee from Kayanza province in northern Burundi, where smallholders grow Bourbon on steep hillsides. The cup is bright, with red fruit and lime over black tea and honey.

Origin & Story

Burundi is a small, densely farmed country in East Africa's Great Lakes region, and coffee there is almost entirely a smallholder crop. Hundreds of thousands of families grow it, most on plots smaller than a football field, and they pick the cherries by hand and carry them to a washing station.

Coffee arrived in the 1920s under Belgian rule, and by the 1930s growing it was compulsory. For decades afterward the industry stayed in state hands, with more than 130 government-owned washing stations run through the Burundi Coffee Board. Privatization only came in 2008, and that is when traceable lots, direct trade and a real specialty market became possible.

Kayanza is one of the northern provinces, hill country that climbs to around 1,650 to 1,950 meters. Washing stations there process the cherries of neighboring smallholders, and the dominant variety is Bourbon, the same old variety that dominates next-door Rwanda.

In the cup, washed Kayanza coffees lean toward red fruit: red berries and lime here, with black tea and honey underneath. Burundi's coffee has one well-known hazard, the potato defect, in which a bacterium carried by the antestia bug gives a few beans a raw-potato smell when ground. Washing stations fight it with careful sorting and pest control, which is part of why a clean, sweet cup like this one is worth having.

Reading the Flavor Profile

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