Cup Characteristics: Honey and raw sugar, aromatic whiffs of Sencha, and Darjeeling teas, a top note of clove spice. Dark roasts are indelibly chocolate-y, with a hint of dark cherry
ABOUT THE BEAN: This is coffee lot incorporates peaberry selections from several coffee washing stations in Rwanda's southern and western provinces. Peaberries are an abnormality that happens when only one of the two coffee seeds inside a coffee cherry germinates, and proceeds to mature inside the cherry as a small, rounded seed. They occur on every coffee shrub, but only in small amounts (roughly 5%). When we buy peaberry lots from a single farmer in say, Guatemala, the final bag count is usually only a couple bags due to the small farm sizes. But in Rwanda, we buy from many cooperative stations that collect coffee from hundreds to thousands of cooperative members, who between them, produce considerably higher volume of this small bean rarity. "Milles Collines", as Rwanda is commonly referred to, French meaning "the land of 1000 hills". The cooperatives who contributed to this blend are situated in the villages at the tops of some of these "collines", affording access to the higher elevation coffees, and offering ease of delivery for these coffee farm members.