Stumptown Coffee Roasters Rwanda Muyongwe
I really enjoy writing in this blog, and have since I began just over a year ago. It’s nice to have a forum for writing down all of the thoughts and ideas I have about these topics, the very same ideas or inspirations that lead me to drinking a specific glass of wine or cup of coffee.
But at the same time I find that I end up with a big backlog of drafts where I’ve written a few notes about something while drinking it, in the hope of returning to it at a later date to actually write the post. Sometimes I don’t return to it for weeks or more, by which time the motivation for writing about the glass at hand may have long since passed. Invariably I am disappointed by having missed the moment.
The reality is that my expectations are so high for each post. I try to set a hard limit of 1000 words per post, which is of course a ton. And I typically am reluctant to sit down and work on a post until I have the time and background information to really flesh out an idea. This approach ends up being somewhat prohibitive, since I just don’t have enough time to do all of the writing that I’d like to, especially now with summer in full swing.
So anyhow, this is a long way of talking myself into writing some more brief posts, so that I can both taste and write about a glass in the moment. Never mind working towards a hard limit of 1000 words, instead in these posts I’d like to aim for 250 words. Short, sweet, and timely.
This post (from this point forwards) is my first such attempt. This pound of coffee was the third of three bags that I bought from Stumptown a little while back, and the second of the two that were from Rwanda. After the previous coffee that I’d tried from this trio, the Rwanda Kanza, I was pretty excited about this one. It also was part of an ongoing series of African coffees that I have been very much enjoying as I try to get my head around the idea of terroir as expressed in this country’s several different coffee-producing regions.
The Muyongwe washing station is located in the province of Gakenke in northern Rwanda. This washing station earned some fame (of a sort) in 2007 when it’s coffee earned the highest price ($55/kilo) ever paid for a Rwandan coffee (at the time) after taking top honors at that year’s Golden Cup competition, Rwanda’s annual competition for coffee producers.
The washing station is part of the Tuzamure Kawa Muyongwe cooperative that is comprised of over 1200 small holder coffee farms. The cooperative first began operating in 2006, and at the Muyongwe station processes up to 297 tons of coffee each year. All of the cherries are of the bourbon varietal and is traditionally fermented in wet-tanks before being dried on 40 raised tables that are left uncovered allowing the beans to dry in the sun.
This was very much in the vein of the other Rwandan coffees that I’ve tasted thus far. The nose had scents of dark fruits, a strong, notable earthiness, and unsweetened baker’s chocolate. The palate was rich with smooth, dark bittersweet chocolate - very reminiscent of an 84% dark Ghana chocolate that I had the other day, intense chocolate with very little sweetness. This is a very softly textured coffee, held aloft by a gentle acidity that lends a mildly astringent element to the dominant chocolate flavors. The finish is warm, with melted milk chocolate and dark cherries combining in a medium-length finish.
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