About this Coffee
We’re excited to share this quintessential example of a natural-process coffee Burundi, not just because Brandywine roasted it to perfection (it’s a mellow balance of sweetness, fruitiness, and nutty earthiness that we love in coffees from Burundi), but because it comes to us by way of Long Miles Coffee Project, a leader in creating positive impact across the coffee supply chain.
In addition to sourcing and roasting with utmost care and intentionality, each bag features a graphic from Brandywine’s in-house designer and is individually screenprinted and wax stamped.
Tasting notes: Black Cherry, Raspberry, Mixed Citrus
Origin: Burundi
Varietal: Bourbon
Process Method: Natural
Elevation: 1750 MASL
More about what makes this coffee special…
Ben and Kristy Carlson moved to Burundi in 2011 and saw that both injustice and poor farming practices permeated the country’s newly privatized coffee industry. They also saw that roasters around the world had a difficult time getting consistently great coffees from Burundi. In an effort to see positive change in both farmers’ and roasters’ lives, Long Miles Coffee was started as a farmer-driven coffee production model back in 2013.
They create traceable micro-lots that yield consistently great coffees while improving the livelihoods of the small holding farmers who grow them. Here are three of the most important ways they do this:
The farmers who grow coffee on the eleven hills they work with receive year-round agricultural assistance through one of twenty-six Long Miles Coffee Scouts who are all well trained junior agronomists.
They do the simplest and best thing you could do for coffee farmers: pay higher prices for coffee cherries as well as annual premiums.
They strengthen relationships between roaster and farmer so that if you want, you can serve coffee from a specific hill year after year.
Their first coffee season they worked with just fifty coffee farmers, and they now work with over 5,500 coffee farming families on eleven unique hills within Burundi, with expansion efforts underway into Uganda and Kenya.