Mushaka is one of the few Rwandan coffee stations we bought last year that we had not visited. But as of last week … now we have!
Last year we found a delicious coffee on the cuppingCupping is a method of tasting coffee by steeping grounds in separate cups for discrete amounts of ground coffee, to reveal good flavors and defects to their fullest.... ...more table, Mushaka, from the Rusizi district of RwandaA Bourbon cultivar variant from Rwanda and Burundi. Bourbon coffees are named for the island in the India Ocean where French colonists grew it. Some history from the... ...more. We bought it, but it was a site we had not visited before. So on the next trip to Rwanda, May 2025, I made a point to get to Mushaka along with JJ, so we could see where the coffee is coming from, how they are working, and to meet the owner Beathe, who lives just up the way from the site on the main road. As it turns out they had trouble with their disc pulper, potentially ruining the batch of coffee from the day before. But they had found a way around it … to rely on grading the coffee after fermentationFermentation in coffee processing traditionally referred to the stage in wet-processing of the coffee. We now understand that fermentation happens more broadly in nearly all processes, including honey... ...more. Such is the pragmatism of managing a rural operation.
While we don’t spend a lot of time on the ground on our visits, it’s still important to make these connections, meet the people producing the coffee, and get a feel for the location and how they work the coffee. That’s a big part of why we travel. -Thompson May 2025
