📍 New Coffee Release 📍
RWANDA SOVU PEABERRY
Red Bourbon / Washed
Orange Candy • Green Apple • Star Fruit
Sweet • Sparkling Acidity
Nice texture • Crisp & Clean
This week we have a peaberry lot from Rwanda which refers to the size and shape of the beans. Normally coffee seeds develop as a pair with flattened facing sides, but sometimes just one seed develops and forms an oval shape to occupy the entire space within the coffee cherry. This is called a peaberry and these small and round coffee beans are carefully selected and separated out from the rest of the crop during the milling stages.
Peaberries seem to have a deeper pocket of sweetness, more balanced structure, and a brighter acidity.
PROCESSING AT MARABA SOVU WASHING STATION
The team at Sovu Washing Station take a huge amount of care in sorting and processing their coffee. Maraba operate a QC lab and own their own dry mill, enabling them to control quality all the way through to export.
* Cherries are delivered to the washing station on the same day as they are picked and are inspected and sorted to ensure only the very ripest cherries are processed. They are then put into a floatation tank and sorted by weight (and any floaters removed) and pulped on the same day—almost always in the evening—using a mechanical pulper that divides the beans by weight (the heaviest usually being the best).
* After pulping, the coffee is fermented overnight for around 12–18 hours and then graded again using floatation channels that sort the coffee by weight. The beans are then soaked for a further 24 hours before being moved to raised screens for ‘wet-sorting’ by hand. All water used during the processing comes from a natural spring with water from the mountains.
* As with most washing stations in Rwanda, women do the majority of hand-sorting. This takes place in two stages—on the covered pre-drying tables and on the drying tables. Washed beans are moved from the wet fermentation tanks onto the pre-drying tables, where they are intensively sorted under shade for around six hours. The idea is that green (unripe) beans are still visible when they are damp, while the roofs over the tables protect the beans from the direct sunlight.
* Next, the beans are moved onto the washing station’s extensive raised drying tables (‘African Beds’) for around two weeks, where they are sorted again for defects, turned regularly and protected from rain and the midday sun by covers, ensuring both even drying and the removal of any damaged or defective beans. During this period, the coffee is also turned several times a day by hand to ensure the coffee dries evenly and consistently.
* After reaching 11% humidity, the coffee is stored in parchment and then when adequately rested it is carefully dry milled at the cooperative’s brand new dry mill in Huye.