Ubuto Washing Station
Double-washed Bourbon from Karuzi province. Red fruit and a clean finish, from a country that produces excellent coffee and gets almost no credit for it.
Burundi is landlocked, small, and sits in the shadow of Rwanda and Ethiopia in almost every conversation about East African coffee. The coffee itself deserves much better than that, and this lot is the case in point.
Double washing
Standard washed processing ferments the seed once to break down the mucilage, then rinses. Double washing, common in Burundi and Rwanda, runs a second, shorter soak in clean water after the first ferment, typically overnight.
The effect is a cup with noticeably more clarity and a longer, cleaner finish. It also costs water and time, which is why it’s not universal. Ubuto station takes cherry from a large number of smallholders with very small plots, so consistency at the station is doing a lot of work that a single-estate lot would get from the farm.
What it tastes like
Red currant and grapefruit up front, cocoa underneath, and a finish that just stops cleanly rather than lingering. The acidity is sparkling without being sour. It’s a structurally tidy coffee. Nothing dominates, and the parts hold together.
One caution worth knowing about East African coffee generally: the potato defect, caused by a bacterial infection in the cherry, occasionally produces a single bean that tastes exactly like raw potato. Good stations screen hard for it and we’ve had no trouble with this lot, but if a cup ever tastes strange, that’s the usual culprit and it’s not your brewing.
How we roast it
Medium, and it’s the easiest coffee on the roster to hit. Dense enough to take heat, sweet enough to reward a slightly longer development than the Ethiopians get, which puts the cocoa forward without losing the red fruit.
Brewing it
Method-agnostic. It’s the one coffee here that’s good on a drip machine, in an AeroPress, and as espresso. If you want one bag that does everything, this is the one.