Cupping Notes: Cooked currant with mild chocolate, cooked berry, and caramel flavours. Juicy malic acidity and mellow clean fruit-like sweetness.
Suited to: All Filter Brewing Methods & Espresso
Process: Washed
Botanical Cultivars: Bourbon
Region: Western Province
Altitude: 1550 metres above sea level
Harvest: March - June
Just a short boat ride from Rwanda’s Lake Kivu shoreline, there rests a secluded coffee island often mistaken for a mirage: Gishamwana Island. More than 35,000 coffee trees are planted on this site, and it's milled and dried here as well, completing the production cycle. The island is biodiverse, with environmental harmony in mind, and cows, goats, and even an albino rabbit coexist with the coffee trees.This island coffee farm is privately owned by Emmanuel Rwakagara, the founder of COOPAC, and the coffee is grown organically amongst forestry that provides a level of shade much greater than is typical for African coffee.
Also, by nature of Gishamwana's isolation from other coffee, many diseases and pests quite simply have not made the boat ride over. This coffee is harvested at ripeness, depulped, dry fermented, wet fermented, washed, soaked, then dried on raised beds.
Rwanda, Gishamwana
COOPAC is a Fair Trade–certified cooperative located near Lake Kivu on the steep slopes of volcanic mountains. The organization was founded by Emmanuel Rwakagara, who is the president of COOPAC and the owner of the Gishamwana Island coffee estate. COOPAC began with 110 farmers in April 2001 and currently has 8,000 members contributing coffee from Ack, Ubuzima, Tuzamurane, Kopabm, Abakundakurima, and Abanyamurava. With 6 washing stations along the northern landscape of Lake Kivu, COOPAC exports 150 containers of Fair Trade-certified coffee annually.