Specialty Coffee Rwanda Kanya Natural

Rwanda is blessed with ideal conditions for growing coffee, including high altitude, regular rainfall, volcanic soils with good organic structure and an abundance of Bourbon varieties.

The vast majority of Rwandan coffee is produced by smallholders; it is estimated that there are around half a million of them, with plots of land often not much larger than a single hectare per family.

Coffee is grown across much of the country, with particularly high concentrations along Lake Kivu and in the Southern Province. Rwandan smallholders organise themselves into cooperatives and share the services of centralised water mills, or washing stations as they are known locally. Flowering takes place between September and October and the harvest runs from March to July, with shipments beginning in August and continuing until December.

Producers

Kanyamibwa Edmond, the previous owner of the Kanya washing station, built it as a mini washing station in 2014 using a loan from RTC. A resident of the area, he was always interested in coffee and used the station to learn and refine cherry processing methods.

In the following years, Kanya grew to process high-quality coffee and significantly increased the station's capacity to handle larger volumes. Kanyamibwa used the profits from Kanya to build a second washing station and, in 2017, decided to sell Kanya to RTC so that he could continue to properly manage the operations of his second facility.

At the Kanya washing station, rigorous processing procedures are followed: the coffee is first passed through flotation tanks to remove any foreign matter, unripe beans and those that float. The coffee is then dried on raised beds for a period ranging from 20 to 25 days.