At Mudhouse, we carefully source and select our coffees from some of the best producers around the world. We strive to roast each and every coffee in a manner that highlights their best innate qualities, allowing you to taste the terroir in which they are grown. Our newest coffee does just that.
We are so excited to announce that the Gisha Burundi is now available. The story of how this coffee comes from small farmers in Burundi to your cup highlights the often incredible lengths coffee travels through the supply chain before reaching your favorite mug every morning.
Region Background
Burundi is one of the poorest countries in the world, and coffee is an important part of their economy. This coffee comes from the Gisha Washing Station in Burundi, located in the northern Ngozi Province on the Tangara Commune:
Coffee is one of Burundi's largest industries, accounting for more than 70% of its exports. Despite that, the coffee they produce accounts for less than 1% of global coffee production.
Unlike larger coffee plantations with sophisticated facilities and large plots of coffee, the Gisha Washing Station collects from multiple small scale farmers, some of whom only have a handful of coffee trees in their backyards. These many farmers work to bring their yields together and create specialty grade coffee.
How We Import Coffee From Burundi
Our friends at Sucafina make it possible to bring this coffee to market. Sucafina is working to increase coffee production and quality in Burundi, increasing the economic opportunity that coffee presents for its people.
In Burundi, Sucafina sets up washing stations with 30-50km radii, where the aforementioned farmers bring their harvested coffee cherries. Then, at the washing stations the cherries undergo rigorous sorting so that only properly ripened cherries are selected for processing. After processing, the beans are then further sorted including hand sorting under blacklights in pitch black rooms. This hard work ensures that only the highest grade beans make it through. The dedication to improvement has resulted in dramatic increases in coffee quality; proof of which occurred last year when the Gisha station produced its first ever harvest of specialty grade coffee.
With all of this amazing work, we are the last step in the chain to happily bring this coffee to life for the second year in a row.
The Last Step
Sucafina then sends the green coffee to our roasting facility and our team gets to work. I profile and roast the beans to highlight their best inherent characteristics, so you can taste where they were grown, and so the hard work of the farmers and washing station staff is not lost. This is an incredibly sweet and clean coffee that highlights some of the best of what Burundi has to offer. In this roast, there are tasting notes of cherry juice, fig, and cranberry.
The beautiful coffee tastes amazing because of all the hard work farmers put into the Gisha washing station. We are thankful they share their hard work with us, and are honored to share it with our customers.
Award Winning Specialty Coffee
