Rwanda - Cyesha Natural [26/27]

Our third season featuring coffee from Cyesha CWS after it first joined us in Colourful V9. We find such an intriguing expression of the Rwandan cup profile in the Cyesha lots - heavy on the baking spice and black tea notes the country is famed for in its washed coffees, but with plenty of fruity notes from the natural process. If it was boozy, we'd put pinot noir or nebbiolo wine as a note, but it doesn't have that ferment driven alcohol profile - just the rich/savoury/spiced character.

Super interesting and very contrasting to our other East african lots on the offer at the moment.

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter/Turbo Espresso

Lightest Roast Influence: This profile sits somewhere between light and lightest in our profiling spectrum - last year we released this coffee as a light, the earlier arrival and release has supported us going a little lighter, but we still think this coffee does better when pushed a tiny bit longer to emphasise sticky jammy spiced notes.

Best Rested: 4+ weeks

Filter: 65g/L, 92°C when fresh; 90°C when rested

Espresso: 18g/50g/20-22s

We're tasting: A little process heavy with the classic Rwandan baking spice - reminding us of fresh mulled wine with all the spiced aromatics. In the cup
it’s like ripe passionfruit, sticky spiced plum jam (especially heavy on the cinnamon, clove and star anise), with dried strawberry in the finish and a weighty body. As it cools becoming like malty, strongly brewed Assam tea, with a muscovado sweetness and milk chocolate note even at a very light roast degree.

Traceability

The Story

The vast majority of Rwanda's smallholder coffee farmers are tending plots that are fractions of a hectare, and the trees on it are oft the household's primary cash crop, with the rest of the land dedicated to subsistence farming.

Coffee trees take several years to reach peak productivity (atleast 2 years from germination to flowering, often 3), and decline significantly in productivity with age, as the nodes along each branch can only fruit once. Over time, productive growth is pushed further out towards the branch tips while the interior wood becomes spent, and the tree's capacity to set fruit diminishes season on season.Pruning and stumping can reset this cycle by forcing new vegetative growth with fresh fruiting nodes, but for a smallholder reliant on a single cash crop, taking a tree out of production for one or two seasons is a serious financial decision.

In addition, achieving continual productivity year on year - especially as coffee trees can live for decades - requires eventually refreshing the nutrients available in the soil; and agrichemical inputs are exorbitantly expensive for the average smallholder. It would be true to say that the majority of Rwandan coffee production is unintentionally organic, and could be certified if it was not for the expense attached to the very same process.

Raw Material have the mission statement of maximising producer income - and with Muraho, their approach to this at Cyesha (and many of their other stations) is built around three interventions. Coffee pulp discarded during processing is combined with grass cuttings to produce an organic compost, which is redistributed to contributing producers at no cost. This gives farmers access to soil nutrition that can help increase the productivity of their trees, which can especially help off-set the "up" and "down" years that happen when a coffee tree expends too much energy on a bumper crop and takes a low yield year to recover. The second track is the distribution of tens of thousands of new seedlings for free each year, and the station's team works with producers on pruning and stumping of older stock - in training how, and encouraging them to do so.

The speciality market plays a direct role in making this work. When coffee is traceable to station level, and sold at speciality pricing rather than moving through commercial channels, the value returned is large enough to fund second payments to producers based on the quality of their cherry at export. That difference in price is what allows a station like Cyesha to reinvest in composting, seedling distribution and agronomic support without simply absorbing the cost as charity.

Over time, the cycle is intended to be self-reinforcing: healthier, younger trees produce better cherry in greater volume, which fetches higher prices, which funds further investment at farm level, maximising producer income.