Rwanda Twongerekawa Coko – Certified Organic

Description

Profile of the cup: aromas of dried fruit and coconut; balanced taste with notes of pineapple and candied fruit; full and round body; malic and balanced acidity.

• Region: Rwanda
• Altitude: 1800 – 2200 metres
• Producers: Twongere Kawa Coko Cooperative (Women’s Cooperative)
• Variety: Twongere Kawa Coko Cooperative
• Certification: Organic and Fair Trade

Twongerekawa Coko is a cooperative of 1200 farms in the Gakenke region, consisting of all female farmers. The coffee cherries are processed by Twongerekawa at the Coko wet mill.

This one is full of deep chocolate flavours with a hint of green apple and black tea.

Gakenke is situated in the North West of Rwanda near the Volcano National Park. The country is often referred to as “the land of a thousand hills”, resulting in many areas of high altitude.

The altitude, rich volcanic soils and tropical rainfall are the perfect storm for growing this exceptional coffee. As always with Rwandan coffee, you will get a typical floral note due to such altitudes (up to 2000 metres above sea level)

Rwanda roared to international buyer attention in the late aughts thanks to one of East Africa’s most successful coffee interventions, the Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda Through Linkages (PEARL). PEARL, a sweeping infrastructure and education investment that vastly increased processing hygiene and organized disparate smallholders into businesses capable of speciality partnerships, took the legacy bourbon genetics buried in abandon and polished them anew to the amazement of coffee drinkers everywhere. In the past decade, Rwanda, one of the most rapidly modernizing countries on the continent, has built steadily on top of these first coffees, and we as buyers now have an awe-inspiring reference for how snappy, mouth-watering, and kaleidoscopic the bourbon lineage can be. Many speciality buyers of Rwanda coffees are familiar with the more famous lakeside cooperatives in the Western Province. This is no coincidence, as these groups are generally more established and larger and have been fully washing their coffees for longer due to the ample ground hydration throughout Lake Kivu’s enormous watershed. Cooperatives from the Northern province, therefore, are often later discovered and beloved for their acid-forward cup profiles, reminiscent more of the smaller coops in the Southern province than the jammier profiles of the West. Twongere Kawa Coko is one of these cooperatives. Not only is it lesser-known and lesser-travelled as a region for buyers, the cooperative is also certified organic—extremely rare for Rwanda, a still-young speciality market where means and access to organic inputs and chains of custody are still very rare.