DR Congo (Kivu) - Kalungu-Birambo Organic Washed

In the cup

If you do not know, I will tell you now: every coffee, if it is good, is good to make both espresso and filter, with any method, as long as it is made well. So try it as you like, but before trying it, if you haven't had it yet in your life, look for a very good dark chocolate, the best you can find, and eat it with two grains of salt, even less. Then make yourself this coffee, with those feelings in mind. It will be the dominant note of this wonderful and very deep coffee, which will be flanked, and you will not fail to notice it, the notes of a thousand red fruits that will slowly overlap one another as the coffee becomes hot in the cup earlier. lukewarm and then maybe even cold, changing but always dancing around that salty chocolate that constitutes its backbone.

The Producer

Democratic Republic of Congo, on the southern shores of Lake Kivu, at an altitude of 2000 meters.

Here more than five thousand six hundred farmers are united in a cooperative with SOPACDI, which stands for Peasant Solidarity for the Promotion of Coffee Actions and Integral Development. Each farmer owns on average less than two hectares of plantations, and all of them give their precious coffee cherries to the ten processing centers in which SOPACDI's activity is divided.

The processing

Coffee cherries are of various cultivars, all precious, starting with the Blue Mountain that became famous in Jamaica, but which - like all cultivars, or almost - was born here, in the heart of Africa. This Kalungu-Birambo it is delivered by the farmers to the washing station in Kalehe, on the shores of the lake.

It is a coffee fully washed, washed: mechanically removed the pulp of the cherries (it is called peel) on the same day they are harvested and delivered, the bone is fermented dry for 12 hours. In the following 12 hours the fermentation continues in the water in which the coffee beans are immersed, to be then started like a green river through the washing channels, where they remain to soak for another 12 hours. At this point the coffee, purified of any residual pulp and mucilage, is left to dry on suspended mesh beds for 14-20 days.

The roasting

The coffees of Smoking Tiger are never very dark: we like the decisive but short, delicate roasts, which do not mask anything, not even the possible defects of a coffee, but which on the other hand are able to enhance the specific characteristics of each territory to the maximum. , of each cultivar, of each processing method, in a word: to enhance the differences to the maximum. Having said that with this coffee, we have perhaps gone a little further than we usually do: the fact is that we had heard, in this coffee from heart of Darkness, an almost salty pungent note of very intense dark chocolate, and we wanted to follow it, this track, to enhance it to the maximum.