Burundi Kayanza Honey Coffee

A honey-process coffee from Kayanza, Burundi. Honey here means the sticky fruit layer left on the bean as it dries, not honey added to the cup, and it gives berry and citrus brightness a softer, sweeter body.

Origin & Story

The word honey on a bag of coffee has nothing to do with bees. Inside every coffee cherry the seed is wrapped in a sweet, sticky layer called mucilage. In a washed coffee that layer is fermented and rinsed off. In a honey process the cherry is pulped, but some of the mucilage is left on the seed, which goes straight to raised beds to dry without being washed.

How much mucilage stays on varies from producer to producer, and it is where the style gets its sweetness and its soft, round body. Across the Great Lakes region, honey and natural processing are relatively new experiments, and were restricted in neighboring Rwanda until recently.

This lot comes from Kayanza province in northern Burundi, where smallholders grow Bourbon on steep hills at roughly 1,650 to 1,950 meters and deliver their cherries to local washing stations. Coffee reached Burundi in the 1920s under Belgian rule, and the sector was opened to private buyers in 2008.

In the cup the honey shows up as sweetness and body rather than as a flavor of its own: berry and citrus for brightness, a tea-like structure, and a caramel sweetness in the finish. A Kalita Wave, a flat-bottomed dripper, is the recipe here, at 93°C.

Reading the Flavor Profile

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