Nkara Peaberry, Rwanda (250gm)

This special coffee was produced using coffee cherry from 130 smallholder farmers who deliver to the picturesque Nkara, Dukunde Kawa Cooperative’s smallest and most remote washing station. Sitting in a valley at 1,880 meters above sea level, the site overlooks a beautiful landscape of rolling green hills dotted with farms and forests.

Unlike most coffee-producing countries, where land size is used as a measure of scale, farms in Rwanda are often very small, and production capability is determined by the number of trees a farmer tends to. The majority of producers who contribute to the Nkara washing station own a couple of hundred trees, planted on one tenth of a hectare of land, along with subsistence food crops like maize, beans and sorghum and livestock like cows, goats and chickens.

This is a peaberry lot, which refers to the size and shape of the beans. Normally coffee seeds develop as a pair with flattened facing sides, but sometimes just one seed develops and forms an oval shape to occupy the entire space within the coffee cherry. This is called a peaberry and these small and round coffee beans are carefully selected and separated out from the rest of the crop during the milling stages. These are little beans with a big flavour! We purchased our first micro-lot of Rwandan peaberries in 2017 and have been consistently impressed with these lots ever since.