A unique coffee with interesting sparkle and grapefruit acidity. Notes of praline and honeycomb, buttery mouthfeel and sugarcane on the finish.

This coffee was produced by the Kimuli Rural Cooperative Society in the Mbinga district of south-west Tanzania, on the eastern shores of Lake Nyasa and not far from Tanzania's border with Mozambique. This green and very hilly area lies at an average altitude of 1,400 metres and has a single rainfall season, which tends to be more reliable than the rains in the north of the country (around Kilimanjaro etc).

For most farmers in this remote region coffee is their only cash crop, unlike in Tanzania's northern growing regions where farmers often also sell fruit and vegetables. This is because the markets of Dar Es Salaam and other major cities are a couple of days drive away from Mbinga in a truck - too far for selling fruit and vegetables. Instead, the Mbinga farmers concentrate almost solely on coffee.

Until relatively recently farmers in this region processed their coffee themselves at home, using hand-pulpers and drying sheets on the ground. However, centralised washing stations - known as Central Processing Units or CPUs - have taken off widely over the past decade. Farmers deliver their ripe cherries to these CPUs, where the coffee is then processed to a far higher standard using modern equipment - with the resulting increase in quality, value and production.

The Kimuli Rural Cooperative is managed by Earnest Komba - who does a very important and often difficult job given that the coop is made up of several hundred smallholder farmers! Most of these farms are less than one hectare in size - although there are the odd ones that cover up to about 10 hectares. The coffee is grown in the partial to full shade of native trees. All work is carried out by hand, and little or no chemical fertilizers or pesticides are used.

At the CPU, the ripe cherries are pulped using a mechanical pulper on the same day that they are picked (usually in the evening/night), fermented and washed in channels (which also help grade the beans by weight), and then dried in the sun on raised screens.

The coffee grown on farms in the area was mostly planted in the 1970s from seed. This means that it is most likely to be either N39 or KP 423 varietal - mostly N39 (the most common varietal in Tanzania). The 'N' in N39 stands for Nyasa - the prefix used when the seeds were distributed from the new breeds bred in the Lyamungu Coffee Research station shortly after the second war. This same research station has also distributed more recent hybrids in the Mbinga area - these are all "tall" varieties without any Catimor genes, and are resistant to both CBD and Coffee Leaf Rust. However, the uptake of these new hybrids has been quite slow, mostly as a Zinc deficiency in the soil hinders root development - meaning the young trees often struggle to carry their first crop.

Farmers in this region use a unique agricultural system for annual crops gown on steep slopes. These are known as "Mtengo Pits" - Mtengo being the name of the local ethnic group. This is a traditional system and involves a rotation of various crops, such as beans (for local consumption) and coffee. The cycle lasts four years and the various crops are grown on the banks between the pits. At the end of the cycle a new pit is dug on the ridge beside each pit, the soil is ridged again in the old pit, which is by now quite full of composted crop residue. The pits also collect a lot of rain and research shows that these are even more effective at controlling soil erosion than modern contour drains!



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