12oz bag

Flavor Notes: cherry, juicy, sweet, creamy caramel, clean and a great aroma

Grower: Members of Burundi chapter of IWCA, organized around the Karehe washing station and JNP Coffee, Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian. Womxn’s produced coffee.

Variety: Local Bourbon cultivars including Jackson & Mbrizi

Region: Busiga Region, Ngozi Province, Burundi

Process: Triple Washed: Cherries floated prior to pulping, fermenting, washing, and soaking, then dried on raised beds.

Intro by Chris Kornman from Royal Coffee. https://royalcoffee.com/product/cj1345/

You may have heard of Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian, the founder of JNP Coffees and not-for-profit Burundi Friends International. She’s a big deal.

Raised in a coffee-producing household in Ngozi, Burundi, Jeanine would go on to earn an MBA from Northwestern University’s prestigious Kellogg School. JNP coffees is highly focused on women empowerment, and Jeanine had undertaken to enlist the women working in coffee in Busiga near the Karahe washing station as members of the Burundi chapter of IWCA, the International Women’s Coffee Alliance. This is no small undertaking, as the average Burundi farmer frequently cultivates just a few dozen trees in their garden, meaning over two hundred women contributed their harvest to this microlot alone. In total, Jeanine’s network includes over 2,000 women in coffee production in Burundi.

We met a few years ago and have been in frequent contact, but it wasn’t until February of 2020 that we were finally able to ink a deal. Jeanine does her own importing, so this coffee had already arrived in the US, all we had to do was taste it and draw up the contracts and book a truck to retrieve it from the Annex. I’d requested a small lot, perhaps 5-10 bags, but the coffee is so tasty — zippy tangerine acidity, some light cinnamon and oolong tea notes, a bit of blackberry and apple cider — we had to grab the whole lot. There’s not a ton, just a handful of CJ boxes and a few bags, but you’d definitely be wise to grab a bit before it’s gone.

Coffee has been grown in and around Burundi for many hundreds of years; robusta is native to nearby regions. Yet specialty Burundi coffee is usually pinned to post-genocide relief efforts. As in neighboring Rwanda, Burundi’s people struggled to overcome incredible tragedy. International aid identified coffee as a potential crop to help elevate and rebuild, and differentiated specialty production can make the difference in sending kids to school and keeping food on the table. In Kayanza and Ngozi, the heart of the nation’s coffee production regions, competition for cherry can be fierce, so washing stations may pay well above the country’s minimum price to court premium harvests. JNP coffee goes a step further, returning second payments to farmers and investing in opportunities for education and community building.

There’s a lot to love about this coffee. We’re really proud to have a small part in its journey to your cup.