This year marks the first-ever Cup of Excellence held in the nation of Burundi, a tiny, densely populated country directly to the south of Rwanda. Our friends and partners at Dallis Bros. Coffee sent a delegate to participate in the proceedings – John Moore, a man who wears many hats at Dallis, but is officially their VP of Sales and Marketing.
Turns out Mr. Moore is a damn good writer, too, and this is most certainly to our collective benefit. Mr. Moore has published a series of candid diaries of his time in Burundi, where he calibrated, slurped, battled potato defect, dealt with power outages, visited pygmy villages, and checked out the local Bujumbura cafe scene. It’s a series of features in 5 parts over on the Dallis blog, each of which are worth your time, and serve as an excellent primer to the current state of coffee and commerce in this tiny East African nation.
Part 1 – in which Mr. Moore drops a CIA Handbook-level of background knowledge on modern Burundi.
Part 2 – in which potato defect runs rampant, yet delicious coffees remain, and we’re given a overview of the small scale of coffee production in Burundi.
Part 3 – in which Mr. Moore cups with Kentaro Maruyama, Paul Songer, and others; visits a pygmy village; meets the de-facto U.S. Ambassador to Burundi; and crawls the coffee bars of Bujumbura.
Part 4 – in which the top 10 coffees are awarded, producers and experts call for continued agricultural investment, and Mr. Moore reflects on the “win-win” relationship between producers, Dallis Bros., and the Cup of Excellence program.
This content is highly recommended by your Sprudge.com editors.
