Burundi is a landlocked African country in the Great Rift Valley at the meeting point of the African Great Lakes region and East Africa. This coffee is grown on terraces on small farms.
The Gomvyi Farmers group consist of around 650 members, from the surrounding hillside delivering coffee in their groups to be processed, wet-milled, fermented and conditioned prior to dry milling. There are up to 10,000 farmers in the region in total delivering coffee from their smallholdings (typically less than 1 hectare in size, with around 200 active producing trees on each one).
After being picked the coffee cherries are soaked and trodden in a similar way to grapes in wine production. This means that the sweetness of the fruit enters the bean. The beans are then dried, soaked with spring water and then dried again. This produces an earthly, chocolate sweetness. There’s almost caramel there too with a creamy texture.