RWANDA - Mbilima Women's Coffee

The Flavour Profile

This is a light-medium roast with elegant notes of plum, pear and apricot. Fully washed and organically grown, this coffee delivers a clean, refined cup — the careful washing process lets the bean’s natural sweetness shine through, giving beautiful clarity and softness to every sip. 

With a light to medium body, it’s delicate, sweet and wonderfully smooth in every cup.

Versatile across all brewing methods — filter, pour over, V60, Aeropress and cafetiere — this is a coffee that can be enjoyed all day long.

Single origin, organic and roasted to order, this Rwandan specialty coffee delivers grace and complexity every time. And we can grind it for you too!

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Freshly roasted to order by Nick at our small family roastery in Canterbury.

The Little Details

This coffee comes from the Musasa Mbilima washing station on the Gakenke district of northern province; in the Ruli sector, in Rubyiniro (Dancing Place) Center Town in Rwanda. This coffee is grown 2020 meters above sea level and is fully washed and sun dried on raised beds. It's drawn from 100% Red Bourbon. 

About the Process

As at most washing stations in Rwanda, women do the majority of the hand sorting. This takes place in two stages-on the covered pre-drying tables and on the drying tables. Washed beans are moved from the wet fermentation tanks onto the pre-drying tables, where they are intensively sorted under shade for around six hours. The idea is that greens (unripes) are still visible when the beans are damp, while the roofs over the tables protect the beans from the direct sunlight. Next, the beans are moved onto the washing station’s extensive drying tables for around 20 days (depending on the weather), where they are sorted again for defects, turned regularly, and protected from rain and the midday sun by covers, ensuring both even drying and the removal of any damaged or ‘funny looking’ beans. After reaching 11% humidity, the coffee is then stored in parchment in Nkara’s purpose-built warehouse prior to final dry-milling and hand-sorting at the Cooperative’s brand-new dry mill in Kigali. Each coffee that arrives is also cupped by Musasa’s team of expert cuppers along with the Q-graders of their exporting partner, Rwashocco.

Lots are usually separated out by days. Upon delivery as cherry, the coffee receives a paper ‘ticket’ that follows the lot through all its processing. This ticket bears the date of harvest and the grade (A1, A2 etc) of the coffee–for instance, if a coffee lot is called ‘Lot 1-06/04-A1’, this means it was the first lot processed on April 6, and the grade is A1. This simple but effective practice is a crucial tool in controlling quality and ensuring the traceability of lots.

But this coffee is more than just exceptional taste. It’s grown and hand-picked by 130 smallholder women farmers in Rwanda’s Mbilima region — many of them widows and heads of their households. The premiums from this coffee are directly reinvested back into these women’s lives, funding education, micro-savings programs and small livestock farming, empowering them to build a sustainable future for their families.