If you love natural process coffees from Rwanda, this one will DELIGHT your palette with notes of sour cherry blasters (yeah, the candy) and mandarin orange.

The natural process - some of the fruit is left on the coffee seed while drying - provides a fruity sweetness and a complexity that will keep your taste buds on their toes.

It’s also our first time partnering with Semilla Coffee who sourced and imported the green coffee. This coffee represents everything we believe in at Smoking Gun Coffee. It feels like the beginning of an amazing relationship with the beautiful people at Semilla Coffee.

ABOUT THE GROWERS

From Semilla Coffee:

By connecting more closely with producers we’re able to ensure we continue to build a sustainable business with them that ensures fair pay for their coffee cherries, but also for recognition and relationships not normally offered to smallholder growers.

One of the first groups that emerged from this project was a group from Fugi Washing Station called Ikizere (confidence or trust in Kinyarwanda). This group was an idea created by Emmanuel from Baho Coffee that was centred around giving support to widowed and single mothers who are also coffee growers, as a means of showing support and recognition for their particularly trying circumstances. As in most of the world, patriarchy continues to create barriers for women in Rwanda.

This group then served to give recognition for their labours as smallholders but also to bring together women with similar backgrounds so that they could connect based on their shared experience and hopefully create a sense of community that assists them in their daily lives. The Ikizere group was such a success that it has now spread to nearly every Baho Washing Station in only two years.

The Akagera Ikizere group is a group of only six women who were united in this group for the 2022 harvest cycle and produced one of the most explosive, fruit-forward, and floral lots of the entire year.

The names of Akagera lkizere producers are Bernadet Nyirantakontagize, Esperence Nyirantezirembo, Jannette Mukashyaka, Beata Nyiranzabandora, Virginie Murekatete, and Lea Kamungenzi.

Quality control is handled at delivery via hand sorting and floating. The good quality cherries selected in this process are stored in bags for 12 hours, allowing the mucilage to stick to the bean. Cherries are then turned out onto drying tables the following morning, with no more than 150kg being placed on each table and the cherries are stacked no thicker than 2 to 4 cm depending on the weather.

For the first 5 days, the cherries are turned every hour, while from day 5 to 20, the coffee is turned every two hours. On the 20th day, the cherries are assessed and if the weather is hot, they are covered for three to five days, and this process is repeated until the 45-50th day. In general, naturals are left to dry for between 50-53 days across all washing stations.

We LOVE the story and all the care behind this coffee and are proud to partner with Semilla Coffee for the first time in SG history. We hope you love it as much as we do.

PROFILE: Light

NOTES: Cherry Blasters, Mandarin Orange, Black Tea

VARIETIES: Red Bourbon

PROCESS: Dry, Natural

ELEVATION: 1535-1900 MASL

Available in 340g or 2.2kg bags. We recommend this for filter or drip coffee for best results.