Gaharo Hill is home to numerous coffee producers and a surprising amount of blacksmiths. On this hill, Long Miles Coffee (a Burundi-based producing company and partner of Osito—the importer of this coffee) built their very first washing station, which they called Bukeye Washing Station.
This lot comes from here, and guess what? It’s a natural process! It is a rare sight within our ocean of washed process origins, but so good and balanced that it caught our full attention. And now we want to share it with you all.
The crop nursery on Bukeye Washing Station
Natural Processing
Coffee cherries are floated and hand-sorted, taking only the ripest straight to drying tables. Here, this lot has spent 34 days drying slowly under the sun, slowly turning from deep red to a prune-like purple-black colour. At the end, the fruits have reached a 10.5% moisture level.
The entire coffee cherry spends between twenty-five to thirty days drying in its skin, slowly turning from deep red to a prune-like purple-black colour when fully dry, reaching a 10.5% moisture level—this one has dried for 34 days.
Drying beds used on Bukeye Washing Station
The Scouts
Emery, Suavis, and Peter are Long Miles’ ‘Coffee Scouts’ working alongside coffee farming families on Gaharo Hill. Together, they support farmers by sharing sustainable farming practices, helping them plant shade trees and green manures, mulch their land, and seasonally prune their coffee trees.
During harvest, the ‘Coffee Scouts’ guide them through the cherry-picking process, helping them spot and catch antestia bugs—the colourful tree pest thought to be linked to the potato taste defect.
