Congo Org. Hala – Idjwi Island Women’s Coffee – Washed AA

Burman Coffee Traders

Details

Origin

Congo

Process

Washed

Roast Suitability

Description

This Congo Idjwi Island green coffee comes from the women producers of Rebuild Women’s Hope, a cooperative based on Idjwi Island in the middle of Lake Kivu, and it was processed at the coop’s Hala washing station. Rebuild Women’s Hope was founded in 2013 by Marcelline Budza to push back on the socioeconomic discrimination women face in Congolese agriculture, where coffee was treated as a man’s crop: women were routinely denied the income from it, along with access to land and inheritance. The coop has grown to more than 3,000 members, most of them women, and it hires more than 5,000 women as day workers through the harvest season. Idjwi sits in the middle of Lake Kivu, along the border with Rwanda, and coffee has been the island’s main source of income for decades. Arabica got there in the 1940s under Belgian colonial rule, when the Bourbon trees planted on the island turned out to cup well. What the island never had was a way to sell it. The wars of the late 1990s took the export industry apart, and for years growers paddled their coffee across the lake to sell it for whatever they could get. Cooperatives like Rebuild Women’s Hope changed that, and Idjwi coffee now leaves the country under its own name. The trees are Bourbon, Caturra and Catuai, planted between roughly 1,500 masl down at the lake shore and 2,000 masl on the high ground, and harvest runs from March into July. This is a fully washed coffee, and Hala is one of the two stations the coop set up with a Penagos pulper, which strips about 80 percent of the mucilage mechanically. That means the coffee only needs a wet fermentation to clean off the remaining 20 percent, instead of the dry and wet double fermentation the coop runs at its stations that pulp without demucilaging. From there the coffee is washed, graded, sorted on pre-drying beds and finished on raised drying beds, with turning and moisture watched on a schedule. Milling and storage happen at the coop’s facility in Bukavu, on the mainland. The l