Tasting Notes:
This is a fantastic blended Decaf from Rwanda and Uganda. Super tasting notes and flavours come through showing you can have great coffee without the caffeine.
About this coffee
Lala Salama means 'sleep well' in Swahili. This is the name we have chosen for all our African decafs.
This lot is a blend of micro lots from Ugandan and Rwandan. Info below
Uganda:
The Coffee Gardens was established in 2017 with the goal of producing incredible specialty coffee in an ethical way, offering a transparent and direct link between coffee farmers and coffee consumers. The following information on our 2022 micro and nano-lots has been produced to enable our customers and consumers to better understand the coffee they are buying, the story behind it, and the incredible farmers who grow it. Micro-lots were assembled by combining day-lots (coffee processed on the same day) with similar taste profiles. Therefore, a single farmer may contribute to multiple micro-lots.
The Coffee Gardens have been working with the farmers who produced this lot for the past five years. They know each and every farming family as they live on the mountain about 600 metres above their washing station. Last year, with the support of roasters, TCG trained these farmers on growing coffee amongst shade trees, good agricultural practices, and of course, better harvesting techniques. In July 2022, TCG distributed over 8,300 shade, fruit and fast growing tree seedlings. In 2023, training continued and they built toilet blocks for the three primary schools in the area, including Zebugu-Busi Primary School.
Farmers have coffee gardens of different sizes and so supply different amounts of coffee. Within hours of being picked, coffee cherries are carried down to our station in 50 kg bags by “runners” - a team of over 160 women and men employed from the local community. This coffee is pulped before undergoing our signature fermentation method involving a pre-wash, a long soak in cold mountain spring water, and then a gentle long fermentation lasting forty hours before a final wash. This coffee is meticulously sorted at 12 different stages before export.
Rwanda:
The Shangi Hills coffee washing station is located in Rwanda’s Western Province, Nyamasheke District, near to Lake Kivu. The nearest town to the site is the Bweyeye village which is in the Shangi sector. The small washing station covers an area of just 1.3 hectares and lies at just under 1700 metres. It was established and built in 2016 but came under the ownership of RTC at the end of 2021, when the owner of sister station, Horizon, purchased the station from its previous owner.
The station is managed by Valency Ndacyayisenga. 2 staff are employed full-time with an additional 80 casual worker employed during the harvest season of March to late May. Annually the station produces around 600, 000kgs consisting of cherry contributions from 556 farmers. Farmers benefit from 14 cherry collection sites surrounding the area. All farmers use organic fertiliser consisting of discarded cherry pulp and manure which is placed at the base of their coffee trees.
Shangi Hills coffee is a new RTC partner and it is located right at shores of lake Kivu. Fidel, the new owner is among the youngest players in the coffee sector. He started as an ordinary trader but eventually as he worked with RTC and saw value in processing fully washed, he embarked on a journey to find a washing. He sold the first washing station that he had build with a partner, and then acquired Horizon first in 2019, and then Shangi Hills early in 2022.