Fully Washed Scr. 15+

Today, Burundi’s coffee industry is fueled by 600,000 smallholders. Since the income from most smallholder farms supports entire families, close to 5 million people depend on the profits of smallholder coffee farms.  

Both state-owned and private actors drive Burundi’s coffee industry and play key roles as washing station management companies and exporters. State-owned companies are called Sogestals, short for “Sociétés de Gestions des Stations de Lavage” (Washing station management companies). Privately-owned companies can operate under a variety of different names.  

In concert with washing station management companies, washing station managers also play an important role in producing high quality specialty coffee. Managers oversee farmer education, aid in the implementation of good economic practices and help farmers implement best agricultural practices. They also collaborate with producers to ensure everyone has access to the necessary tools and inputs—and the knowledge of how to best use them. 

Most coffee trees in Burundi are Red Bourbon. Because of the increasingly small size of coffee plantings, aging rootstock is a very big issue in Burundi. Many farmers have trees that are over 50 years old, but with small plots to farm, it is difficult to justify taking trees entirely out of production for the 3-4 years it will take new plantings to begin to yield.   

Despite the ubiquity of coffee growing in Burundi, each smallholder producers a relatively small harvest. The average smallholder has approximately 250 trees, normally in their backyards. Each tree yields an average of 1.5 kilos of cherry so the average producer sells about 200-300 kilos of cherry annually. 

During the harvest season, all coffee is selectively hand-picked. Most families only have 150 to 300 trees, and harvesting is done almost entirely by the family.  

Most of the country’s 600,000 smallholders do not have access to processing equipment and instead deliver their cherry to washing stations. Approximately 70% of the total coffee yield in Burundi is processed as fully washed, like this lot. Quality assurance begins as soon as farmers deliver their cherry. Sorting processes vary from station to station, but typically, the first step is to float the cherry in small buckets. After floating, the higher quality cherry is sorted again by hand to remove all damaged, underripe and overripe cherries.    

After sorting, cherry is de-pulped within 6 hours of delivery. The coffee is then fermented in water from a nearby stream for 10-12 hours, depending on ambient temperature.  

After fermentation is completed, coffee is run through washing and grading canals. As the beans flow through, wooden bars that are laid across the canal prevent beans of specific densities from passing through. These bars are spaced across the channel. While the first blockade stops the most-dense beans, the next is arranged to stop the second most-dense beans and so on.  

The beans are then transported to the drying tables where they will dry slowly for 2-3 weeks. Pickers go over the drying beans for damaged or defective beans that may have been missed in previous quality checks. The beans are covered with tarps during periods of rain, the hottest part of the day and at night.  

Screens are used to separate beans by size. The process of separating beans by size is a crucial stage of the dry milling process. A screen grading machine has a series of screens stacked on top of each other. Green coffee is fed into the machine, and as the screens are shaken, beans that are smaller than holes on a specific screen will fall through to a lower screen until they reach a screen with holes too small for them to fit.  

Beans in a Scr. 15+ blend will be larger than 6 millimeters.