Rwanda - Gito FW

The Gito ("small") project is built on a simple premise: that the undersized screen grades from Rwandan washing stations, typically sold domestically for a fraction of export value, cup just as well as their larger counterparts. By preparing these smaller beans to export standard, Raw Material & their Rwandan partners, Muraho Trading Company return significantly more value to producers while delivering an excellent product.

Following a run of natural process coffees on house filter, this washed lot marks a welcome return to something clean and composed, we find lots of buttery sweetness and balanced acidity.
Roasted with a touch more development than our typical light roast offering.

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Omni, suitable for filter and sweet classic style espresso

Light-Medium Roaster Influence:
Roasted slightly slower and longer than our other East African coffees to aim more towards brown sugar, lower acidity and comforting flavours, without tasting roast character. 

Best Rested: 2-3 weeks

For Filter: 95°C, 62g/L when fresh, when well rested you can go down to 91°C and 60g/L

For Espresso: 18g, 40g out, 32-34s trad style

We’re tasting: Aromas of marmalade, dark fruits and toffee. In the cup it's buttery bodied and very sweet, with distinct notes of plum crumble, stewed apple and milk chocolate. As it cools the sugary notes evolve to fruity muscovado.

Traceability

Country of Origin:	Rwanda
Region:	A regional blend from Nyamasheke & Nyabihu
Producer:	6000 smallholders working with Muraho Trading Company in the 2025 harvest.
Stations:	Kilimbi, Rugali, Gisheke, Bumbogo, Cyesha, Dahwe, Shyira, and Vunga CWS
Variety:	Red Bourbon (likely some Mibirizi, Jackson, RAB C15, & Bourbon Mayaguez also, but these would be delivered as "Red Bourbon" by the farmers)
Elevation:	1550 - 2400 MASL
Process:	Traditional Washed: Cherries are hand sorted before floating to remove underripes and lower density floaters, before pulping. Parchment is fermented in open concrete tanks, with ceremonial foot stomping (Imagine old-school grape pressing, but with incredible songs. Each station have their own) to agitate and loosen the mucilage. Post fermentation, the coffee is washed down serpentine grading channels to sort by density, and the now squeaky clean parchment is taken to a pre-drying station for intensive hand sorting. Dried on raised beds with frequent turning and continual sorting. During dry milling, the coffee is graded by size, with these smaller beans (SC 13/14 = 5.54mm and below) separated but prepared for export grade, amalgamated into a regional blend of all MTC stations.
Import Partner:	Raw Material
Harvest:	Crop 25/26, Arrived UK Dec 2025 Third harvest purchasing Gito

 

The Story

Muraho Trading Company was founded in 2015 by brothers Karthick and Gaudam Anbalagan, whose family has worked in East African coffee for over three decades. Their father established operations for a Swiss-based coffee company across Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda after moving the family from Uganda to Rwanda in 1996.

The brothers grew up around coffee warehouses before leaving for secondary school and university in New Zealand, where they encountered speciality café culture and noticed how underrepresented Rwandan coffee was in Australasian roasting. Karthick returned to East Africa to manage logistics across Burundi and Rwanda; Gaudam started a coffee trading company in Wellington. The two paths converged when they built their first washing stations, Kilimbi and Rugali, in Nyamasheke District in early 2016.

Muraho now operates eight washing stations across three districts, including Shyira at 1850 metres above sea level, reportedly Rwanda's highest, and Vunga, a female-led cooperative of 260 members that MTCo. has partnered with since 2017. They completed their own dry mill at Rugali in 2019, with the intention of locating milling infrastructure upcountry rather than in Kigali - creating employment and permanent jobs where the coffee is actually produced (we're huge fans of moves like this)

It is at this dry mill where the Gito programme takes shape: after screen sorting, the 13/14 fraction is separated and then density sorted to isolate only the highest grade beans before passing through electronic colour sorting and hand sorting to remove defects.

Rwanda's coffee grading system assigns speciality status based on screen size, with beans needing to pass screen 15 or above for general export-quality speciality. Anything smaller is typically relegated to the domestic commodity market at dramatically lower prices, despite coming from the same trees, the same soil, the same altitude, and the same farmer's labour. In a country where the average coffee plot is around a quarter of a hectare and there are no large estates to speak of, the difference between commodity and speciality pricing at farm gate is incredibly meaningful.

Rwanda's coffee is entirely smallholder produced, grown by an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 farmers, and population growth continuously fragments landholdings through inheritance. Coffee competes directly with food crops for the same scarce land, so *any* mechanism that increases the proportion of a harvest reaching speciality pricing, without requiring additional inputs or labour from the farmer, has a truly impactful effect on household income.

The Gito Project functions entirely at the post-harvest milling stage. It recovers value from beans that already exist in the supply chain but would otherwise be lost to conventional grading logic. Raw Material, the UK-based non-profit (community interest company) green coffee importer through whom we purchase this coffee, co-developed the concept with Muraho (alongside the roaster partner who helped fund the start of Raw Material UK).

When we set out to build our house filter range, we needed coffees that could deliver consistently excellent daily drinking while supporting meaningful change in coffee-growing regions. This is our third harvest purchasing Gito, and the project continues to represent something we find structurally compelling about how value moves through the speciality supply chain.

Having used it purely as a Facility component for the first two seasons, we kept hitting the QC cupping table thinking "wow! this really could stand up to being a single origin release" - and it's a joy to finally make this happen.