Munyinya | Burundi

TL;DR: This coffee has about as many layers of flavour as the layers of good social, economic and environmental work that goes into producing it… which is A LOT! Enjoy, knowing that buying this coffee is supporting some truly great projects for many families.

 

This coffee is yet another prime example of how we like to buy and share with you. A coffee that’s come from somewhere a little unexpected, tastes truly wonderful, and is helping do good things for the communities that grow it.

We’ve roasted this coffee with great care, like always, but we’ve really tried to make sure that we find a nice balance with the processing, the underlying spiced flavours expected from Burundi coffee, and the jammy sweetness we really wanted to deliver.

From our import partner Osito “Munyinya lies just beyond the border of Bukeye commune. The dirt road winding towards the hill is cut into the side of steep slopes that drop into cinematic views of the valleys below. Coffee trees line the steady incline that leads to the tiny town center. Despite its beauty, it was a hill that Long Miles almost gave up on because year after year, farmers kept delivering bad quality cherries. But, when a hill holds as much potential as Munyinya, it is worth rolling up our sleeves and pouring our efforts into it day after day.”

Bukeye Washing Station has its own borehole water source and a granite filtered well. 

During the natural process, coffee cherries are floated and hand-sorted, then taken straight to the drying tables. The whole coffee cherry spends between twenty-five to thirty days drying in its skin, slowly turning from deep red to a prune-like purple-black color when fully dry, reaching a 10.5% moisture level.

Lydie is one of the Coffee Scouts (read more below) working alongside the coffee farming families on Munyinya hill. She has been empowering farmers with sustainable farming practices, helping them to plant shade trees, green manures, mulch their land and seasonally prune the coffee trees. During coffee harvest, she stands side by side with farmers, guiding them through the cherry picking process. She has also taught farmers how to spot and catch antestia bugs, the colorful bugs thought to be linked to the potato taste defect, that can be found in the coffee trees.

From Long Miles Coffee in Burundi:

Coffee holds so much potential. It has the ability to change a landscape and transform a people, but it is so easy to feel distant from the origin of your coffees and the impact your purchase makes on coffee growing communities. We understand your need for both transparency and great coffee, which is why we started Long Miles Coffee as a farmer driven coffee production model. Our first coffee season we worked with just fifty coffee farmers, we now work with over 5,500 coffee farming families on eleven unique hills.

 

We create traceable micro-lots that yield consistently great coffees while improving the livelihoods of the small holding farmers who grow them. Here are three of the most important ways we do this:

1) The farmers who grow coffee on the eleven hills we work with get year round agricultural assistance through one of our twenty-six Long Miles Coffee Scouts who are all well trained junior agronomist. Our Coffee Scouts, most of whom originated from the hills they work on, help farmers to understand and implement better farming practices, which increases both the quality and the yield of the coffee cherries. We also have our own coffee farms within these communities, these farms serve as “model farms” that show farmers first hand the improved yields they can expect from proper farm care and from planting indigenous shade trees.

2) We do the simplest and best thing we could do for coffee farmers in Burundi, at our washing stations we pay higher prices for coffee cherries as well as annual premiums.

3) After seeing the environmental effects of climate change on Burundi’s agriculture, we started a long-term reforestation project called Trees For Kibira. This project will provide a generational solution to soil health, climate change and farmer security challenges in Burundi.

We start with the same recipe for all of our espresso coffees:
 

• 20g dose
• 45g yield
• 30 seconds

 

From here we will tweak things to get the flavours to highlight things we like. Use this as your starting point and go wild!

 

Note: some domestic espresso machines can’t use a 20g dose. Please always follow your manufacturers instructions to avoid damaging your equipment.