Burundi Go Go Juice - Natural Process
Burundi has long been overlooked in comparison to its neighbouring East African specialty coffee producing powerhouses. However, Burundi season, for us, is one of the highlights of the annual coffee calendar. The country’s coffee is produced almost entirely by smallholder farmers, and much of this small-scale production is of exceptional quality. With its super sweet, clean and often floral coffees, Burundi, every year, is increasingly is putting itself on the specialty coffee map.
Burundi Go Go Juice - Process and Harvest
Most coffee trees in Burundi are Red Bourbon. Because of the increasingly small size of coffee plantings, aging rootstock is a very big issue in Burundi. Many farmers have trees that are over 50 years old, but with small plots to farm, it is difficult to justify taking trees entirely out of production for the 3 to 4 years it will take new plantings to begin to yield. In order to encourage farmers to renovate their plantings, Greenco purchases seeds from the Institut des Sciences Agronomiques du Burundi (ISABU), establishes nurseries and sells the seedlings to farmers at or below cost.
Despite the ubiquity of coffee growing in Burundi, each smallholder produces a relatively small harvest. The average smallholder has approximately 250 trees, normally in their backyards. Each tree yields an average of 1.5 kilos of cherry so the average producer sells about 200 to 300 kilos of cherry annually.
During the harvest season, all coffee is selectively handpicked. Most families only have 200 to 250 trees, and harvesting is done almost entirely by the family.
Quality assurance begins as soon as farmers deliver their cherry. All cherry is floated in small buckets as a first step to check quality. After floating, the higher quality cherry is sorted again by hand to remove all damaged, underripe and overripe cherries.
Following sorting, the beans are transported directly to the drying tables where they will dry slowly for 3 to 4 weeks. Cherry is laid out in a single layer. Pickers go over the drying beans for damaged or defective beans that may have been missed in previous quality checks. The washing station is very strict about allowing only the highest quality cherry to complete the drying process.
At the washing station, farmers can obtain organic fertilizer from composted coffee pulp. To promote farm renovation, producers can get low-cost, subsidized coffee seedlings at the washing station. Each station has its own nursery for this purpose.
The washing station participates in a number of farmer outreach and support projects including a livestock rearing project and a range of projects centred on strengthening cooperatives and improving yields.
Chipp Coffee Co Roastery Update
We have been incredibly busy throughout July. One of our white label partners has blown up and kept us insanely busy for the whole month amassing over a thousand orders in just a couple of weeks! Zach came back from his paternity leave just in time to get stuck in with the chaos. It's been full throttle in the roastery for the entirety of July which is awesome so thank you all for helping us stay busier than ever!
What We're Listening To
This month Bring Me The Horizon released the 20th anniversary re-recording of their genre defining album Count Your Blessings. This album has been completely redone from the ground up and sounds bigger and badder than ever. Honestly I forgot how good this album is and it sounds absolutely incredible. They also released a new track for this album called Dehumanised which is quite frankly disgusting. Go check it out and get your biggest stank face on for banger after banger.
