Our third harvest purchasing yeast inoculated lots from the Kibingo washing station; having previously featured these coffee as a component in Colourful and as an espresso focused lot. This year sees a filter focused selection, with a fully washed lot featuring Lalcafe 'Oro' yeast.

The Story

Kibingo is a relatively large-scale washing station, situated in Kayanza, northern Burundi. It serves as a central hub for 3,515 registered coffee growers from 18 surrounding hills, with farm altitudes ranging between 1,700 and 1,900 metres. The farmers are organised into groups of 30, each led by a farm leader who facilitates communication and coordination with the washing station.

The station is well-equipped for bulk coffee processing, with 10 fermentation tanks, 2 soaking tanks, and 165 drying tables, with an additional 4 pre-drying tables. Additionally, it provides essential resources to the farmers, such as organic fertiliser made from composted coffee pulp and low-cost coffee seedlings (with certified seed-stock bought in from the Institut des Sciences Agronomiques du Burundi) for farm renovation, nurtured in the station's own nursery.

In terms of cultivation, the majority of coffee trees in the region are Red Bourbon, chosen for quality. However, farmers face challenges due to the ageing rootstock and small plot sizes, making it hard to renew plantations without taking a significant loss of income. Despite Burundi's widespread coffee cultivation, individual smallholder farmers produce modest harvests, with an average of 250 trees per farmer and a typical yield of 200-300 kilos of cherries annually. It is the ability to offer differentiated and nuanced profiles, as well as providing added value to bulk production that has brought us back to the Kibingo yeast lots.

A yeast inoculated coffee from the Kibingo station in Burundi formed the centrepiece of our green buyer and co-founder Alex’s 2019 United Kingdom Barista championship routine - focused around the concept of elevating “classic” and lower scoring coffees to improve farmer livelihoods. In the years that have passed since then, yeast processing in coffee has taken off, with both commercially available yeasts for bulk processing, and better resourced farmers (typically in Colombia) isolating local strains with positive characteristics. 

All of this can be seen to be operating almost as a reverse of the wine industry’s “natural wine” movement. Spontaneous fermentation in wine allowed new and unusual sensory characteristics to be expressed in the final product, but at the risk that some of the harvest would be sub-par, allowing a generation of vignerons to rebel against the overly technical and controlled nature of the mature wine industry.

Coffee, as a relatively young industry when it comes to the technical skills of fermentation, is starting from a place where a decade or so back, 100% of coffee was fermented using spontaneous fermentation - using wild yeast and bacteria present at the mills to both aid processing as well as improve the sensory attributes of the final cup.  All the while introducing an element of random variability (and risk) in the final product. Some years, a coffee could be outstanding, a cup of excellence winner, and a boon to the farmers; the next crop a blender (or worse).

As the coffee industry matures, each year brings new and improved technical interventions that allow farmers more control over the output of fermentations, of which  specific yeast inoculations are somewhat at the forefront. 

We expect to see this movement continue - producers in Colombia (such as Señores Bermudez, Benitez, Ramirez, etc) continuing to push the boundaries of flavour and technical intervention, whilst central mills in less developed countries will gain improved access and knowledge to products such as the Lalcafe (an offshoot of wine yeast producer Lallemand) yeast used in this Kibingo lot.

We've consistently enjoyed the profiles found in the yeast inoculated lots that Sucafina's local office (Greenco) produce - across the spread of natural & washed and all the various strains of Lalcafe's coffee specific yeasts. As per last year; we've got two stations, two processes, two strains of yeast - but this year we have flipped the usage, releasing a washed for filter and reserving the natural for Colourful