Theo Nkusi
Nyamasheke · Rwanda · 1900 masl
Overview
Theo does not own a farm. He runs the washing station at Nyamasheke, which takes cherry from about three hundred and forty smallholders on the hills above Lake Kivu, most of them farming well under a hectare. What he owns is the decision about what happens to that cherry between the truck and the drying bed, and since 2017 that decision has been made lot by lot rather than by the day.
The station
Red Bourbon, almost entirely, at 1900 masl on slopes steep enough that cherry comes down on foot. Deliveries are weighed and floated separately by grower rather than tipped together, which is slower and is the only reason a lot like this one can exist. Theo keeps roughly forty of those grower lots separate through drying each season; the rest goes into the station blend, which is a perfectly good coffee and is not this one.
We turn the beds every two hours, by hand, because a machine cannot feel when a lot is drying unevenly on one side.
Theo Nkusi · Nyamasheke
The process
Natural — whole cherry straight onto the beds, no pulping at all. Twenty-one days, one layer deep, turned by hand every two hours through daylight and covered at midday when the sun is hard enough to case-harden the skin. Rwanda is not an obvious place for naturals: the rain is unpredictable and a stalled bed goes to ferment fast. This works because somebody is on the beds all day, which is a labour cost and not a technique.
The coffee
Medium — first crack at 9:58, dropped at 12:08, 221.4 °C. The raspberry is already there in the green and the roast is mostly an exercise in not losing it, so development is short and the last two minutes are flat on purpose. The curve is published in full.
Read the profile — Strecker-03 →Want the next lot from this station?
Say so and we will hold one back. Same address as everything else on this site.