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Dukunde Kawa is a well-known producer group in Rwanda, as much for exceptionally
bright and memorable coffees as for its exceptional business structure: the cooperative
carries multiple certifications for its various washing stations including Fair Trade,
Organic, Rainforest Alliance, and UTZ, and more than 80% of its workforce is women.
Not only that but the organization is located in the Northern province, which, despite its
closeness to Kigali, tends to be little-known in specialty coffee compared to the west
and south. Since first organizing in 2000 with a single wet mill, years before the majority
of washing stations in Rwanda even existed, Dukunde Kawa has received sustainability
awards from the SCA as well as placing in the top positions in Rwanda’s Cup of
Excellence competition. Today the cooperative has over 2,000 farmer members and 4
washing stations in the Gakenke District north of Kigali. Ruli is one of these stations.
Ruli was established by Dukunde Kawa in 2004 and originally served 300 local coffee
farmers. Today there are over 800 contributing farmers and Ruli is Dukunde Kawa’s
largest station. This is one of the highest elevations that Dukunde Kawa serves, with
farms passing 2100 meters. Ruli itself sits at 2100 meters, making it one of the highest
washing stations in the country. Because of the high elevation and local climate, harvest
here progresses slowly and members annually pick coffee into the month of October,
multiple months past the majority of the country.
Processing at Ruli includes cherry sorting by the farmers themselves upon delivery. The
cherry is then floated in a large receiving bay to identify and remove floaters (low-
density cherry which is processed separately). Cherry is then depulped and the fresh
parchment is graded immediately by flotation in a short channel. Fermentation usually
lasts 18 hours and is completed without water. Once the dry fermentation is complete
the parchment is soaked in fresh water between 18-24 hours to halt fermentation and
the stabilize moisture content of the batch. After the soak the parchment is washed
once again, this time in grading channels—long shallow concrete channels with water
flowing through—which allows the parchment to naturally separate by density. From
here, each separate density grade is moved to pre-drying tables to be hand-sorted for
imperfections and gently dried to the touch. After the hand-sort is complete, the
parchment is then moved to fully-exposed drying tables to finish drying, a process that
takes between 14-21 days depending on the climate.
Despite its diminutive size compared to other East Africa coffee producing countries,
Rwanda’s coffee has an important history and terroir entirely unique to the rest of the
continent. Coffee was originally forced upon remote communities by the Belgians as a
colony-funding cash crop. The Belgians distributed varieties cultivated by the French on
Ile de Bourbon (now Reunion Island, near Madagascar) but had so little invested in
coffee’s success that they immediately allowed production to decline through lack of
investment in national infrastructure, as well as the farmers who grew it. As a result, the
sector suffered near total obscurity in the coffee world from Rwanda’s independence in
1962 until the period of rebuilding following the country’s devastating civil war and
astonishingly tragic genocide in 1994.
Rwanda’s former cash crop, however, roared to international buyer attention in the late
2000’s thanks to one of East Africa’s most successful coffee interventions, the
Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda Through Linkages (PEARL). PEARL
was a sweeping infrastructure and education investment targeting large regions of
Rwanda whose coffee was for the most part processed poorly at home and exported
with little traceability. The program, designed and led by the University of Michigan,
Texas A&M and a host of Rwandan organizations, vastly increased processing hygiene
by building washing stations. It also organized remote and under-resourced
smallholders into cooperative businesses capable of specialty partnerships. Perhaps
most significantly for the long term, it took the legacy bourbon genetics buried in
abandon and polished them anew to the amazement of coffee drinkers everywhere. The
snappy acidity, stone fruit flavors, and fragrant herbaceousness found in Rwanda’s
coffee is still completely unique to bourbon produced anywhere else in the entire world.
Producer groups like Dukunde Kawa cherish their farmers’ potential and are learning to
maximize the quality and variety available from Rwanda’s most promising terroirs.
Good at almost any roast, would start where you personally tend to enjoy coffees, a
medium roast is great if unknown. Easy to roast, even roasting with medium to low
chaff.