Thursday

From Kigali to California

It’s August and the coffee harvest season is officially over. The wet-mills finished processing in May and June and are now in the process of exporting their coffee.

The coffee is trucked from the wet-mills to a warehouse and dry-mill facility. The dry-mill removes the parchment (or outer shell) leaving just the green bean.


parchment

In the warehouses, hundreds of ladies sort the green coffee removing damaged or defective beans. This process is very time consuming; it takes one person 2 days to sort a 60kg bag.


After the coffee is sorted and the pre-shipment sample is approved by the cupping lab, the coffee can be exported. OCIR Café, the Rwandan coffee authority, issues a certificate of origin and the bags are loaded onto a cargo container.




From Kigali, the trucks of coffee go to Uganda, then through Kenya to the coast and the port city of Mombasa. This trip takes an average of 4 days. Once the coffee is loaded onto a ship in Mombasa, the trip to California can take 2-3 months.


The process from start to finish is long but the end product is worth it – good quality coffee!

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