Burundian Heza Peaberry Natural coffee beans

Burundian Heza Peaberry Natural is a coffee from the Long Miles Coffee Project we sourced via Marunic.

Burundi’s Coffee

Burundi has the ideal conditions for growing quality coffee. The country has a tropical climate and most of its land is highland. Moreover, a lot of the coffee is grown under the shade of trees.

However, Burundi is not a coastal country. It is surrounded by land, except for the 10% of its area that is covered by Lake Tanganyika. Because of this, Burundi coffee has faced some challenges to reach the global market. Thankfully, some initiatives like the Long Miles Coffee Project are helping to change that. They are supporting the coffee farmers and improving the quality of their beans, especially since the country started to rebuild itself in 2006.

Long Miles Coffee Project

We started working with Long Miles Coffee Project (LMCP) in 2013. Ben and Kristy, the founders of Long Miles Coffee Project (LMCP), moved to Burundi with their family and a dream in 2013. Their goal was to help the local farmers produce high-quality coffee and earn more income. To achieve this, they built three processing stations (one of which is Heza) and offered training and support to the growers. In addition, they paid them higher prices for their coffee. As a result of their efforts, the farmers improved their production and quality.

Since 2013, we have secured coffee from LMCP every year, except for 2015 when Burundi faced a crisis. After a long gap of almost two years, we are happy to offer a LMCP coffee again. We worked with Marunic to get this chance.

In 2016 we invited Ben and Kristy to share their story with us. You can watch their talk on YouTube:

About this coffee

We are fortunate enough to have direct contact with Ben, and he gave us the following details of this coffee:

“We made this lot combining the PB beans from Gitwe, Mikuba, and Gishubi hills from Heza washing station. This is an extremely hard bean. This small lot was just 3 bags because we had a really small amount of PB during the harvest. What makes this special as well is that rarely do we have Natural PB lots. So, add in some juicy notes to the baking spice and dark berries.

“This lot was sun dried on raised beds for nearly 40 days.”

We have done coffees from Gitwe and Gishubi before, this is a rare opportunity to taste a regional “single-origin” blend, based on the bean size.

Heza washing station

Visiting Heza Washing Station at 1960 masl is like an off-road adventure. You have to switch-back up mountainsides and cross small, hand-built log bridges. Heza Washing Station is very remote, but the community around it is special. Most of them are coffee farmers. In Kirundi, the local language of Burundi, Heza means ‘beautiful place’. The washing station deserves its name, because it has panoramic views and a stunning East African sky.

Details of this coffee

Our brews:

Transparency Information

Sources

• James Hoffman’s Coffee Atlas
• Wikipedia
• Long mile coffee project website and emails
• Some rewrites done via Microsoft Copilot.