Coffee Shrub's Definitive Guide To Rwanda and Burundi Coffee

There’s some really beautiful new content up over at Coffee Shrub, the Oakland-based green import specialists with a penchant for blogging. Coffee Shrub is home to 2011 Sprudgie Award winner Aleco Chigounis, and alongside founders Thompson Owen (a 2011 SCAA Distinguished Author Award winner) and Christopher Schooley, the three of them have created an important bedrock of fundamental reading material about coffee sourcing and importing. Reading through these blog posts has helped inform Your Sprudge Editors for many years, and right now we’re digging on their latest, this definitive guide to the coffees of Rwanda and Burundi.

Whether you’re a seasoned traveling coffee buyer or a complete novice, the guide has something to learn for everyone. Here’s an excerpt:

“…how any society returns to a “normal” life after the tragedy of monumental scale is difficult to imagine. But the recovery in Rwanda has occurred with an unflinching openness to the genocide. After the genocide, as the floodgates opened for assistance to the Rwandese population, revitalizing coffee production was seen as an important goal. To do this, organizations like the PEARL project and SPREAD standardized and trained farmers and new cooperative washing stations in traditional techniques of coffee production based on other East African countries. Burundi in particular offered a good model for production.”

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You can (and should) read the whole guide here. And hey, while you’re at it, relive our own coverage from a trip to Rwanda in 2012 — we’re no experts, but this collection of articles provides another style of information on the washing stations and regions of Rwanda. Each photo below links to a different story from Rwanda.