Rwanda Karongi Gitesi - Green Coffee Beans - 16oz Bag

Gitesi, which happens to be one of my favorite sites in Rwanda. Not only is it located in a beautiful valley, but the washing station looked clean, well-organized, and the leaders seemed motivated and competent. The Gitesi site is at 1740 meters, actually one of the lower areas surrounded by high ridges ranging up to 2000 meters, where coffee is grown. 1,830 coffee farmers in the area supply Gitesi with cherries each year. The station fosters a relationship with the farmers by paying an additional dividend at the end of each season based on performance.

Gitesi was started in 2005 and has been building capacity each year. Like much of Rwanda, the coffee is Bourbon variety. We "built" this lot by looking at all their day lot batches and combining the best ones. Early lots from Gitesi were not cupping consistently good, so we excluded those. But we found some excellent process batches from the middle harvest. And we're not the only ones noticing: Gitesi won COE a couple years back and continues to produce competition level coffees.

Gitesi continues to produce some of the best coffee we see from the region, and this year's lots are of significant quality. The wet grounds have a rich sweetness at light roast levels. Brown sugar and butter hang heavy in the air and with a slight floral note underneath. There's a tartness to the cup that in light roasts especially takes on flavors of rose hips and mandarin orange. There's a refined sweetness as well, like raw cane sugar. Buttery flavors shift toward lactic/cream as the cup cools and with hints of vanilla, tastes of cream soda.