Looking to kick up your coffee with a bit of spices?

Are you bored of overwhelming “chocolate” or “nutty” coffees? Do you also avoid anything with tasting notes citing citrus? Then La Soledad might be the bean for you. This coffee has no acidity at all but makes up for it by bringing in some solid spices and a long finish. When roasted light to medium, these beans are sassy. They give off strong notes of cinnamon, cardamom and a few other sweet spices that we honestly couldn’t pin down. The notes evolved in our cups, defying consensus. These are distinctly spicy and will break you out of the coffee doldrums. 

La Soledad’s beans work well in most coffee brewing setups: espresso, pour-over, Moka pot, whatever. They make a killer cold-brew too where the spices are even stronger.  

Ethical to the core

La Soledad may produce spicy beans but their approach to farming couldn’t be more mild. They ensure a healthy, ethical work environment on their plantation. They preserve local water streams, native vegetation and conserve their forests. La Soledad looks after the humans too; providing health care, clean and safe living quarters for workers and families, fair wages and trainings.

The Original Home of Coffee.

In the homeland of coffee, hidden among the trees in the Kaffa region of Ethiopa, coffee plants grow wild and free. These coffee plants are thought to be the closest in flavour to the original coffee beans first discovered, according to popular legend anyway, by goat herders in the region. There is a wide range of coffee varietals that grow in this forest and although they are carefully tended to, the farmers don’t really focus on a single varietal. This blend doesn’t mean any loss of quality however, the farmers just harvest the best, ripest beans from the tops of these old, mature coffee trees and the result is a much stronger taste of the bean’s origin rather than any differences in the varietal itself. These beans are then sorted by size and wet-processing is used to preserve their character.

Typical flavours from this coffee are rich and earthy with low acidity and a not-so-subtle chocolate aftertaste. To help enhance the chocolate notes and make a richer coffee we toast the beans a bit longer and darker for our roaster’s-choice.

BufCoffee – A woman led endevour.

Bufcoffee is one of those companies that you just can’t help falling in love with. Epiphanie Mukashyaka founded Bufcoffee in 2003 because she was passionate about coffee, and she wanted to help lift others in her community who needed a helping hand. As a widow of seven children, Epiphanie knows a thing or two about perseverance – and about neighbors helping neighbors.

In order to follow her dream of bringing high-quality coffee production to her community, Epiphanie learned everything she could about the coffee trade, went through tons of training on all levels of fully washed coffee production and quality control, and quickly achieved something amazing: she became one of the region’s only female coffee producers!

But Epiphanie didn’t stop there, she shared her company’s success with her community by providing water sanitary systems, health insurance for the farmers, and generally improving living standards. They’ve even built a local school!

Bufcoffee Tasting Notes

From the moment you open a bag of Bufcoffee coffee beans and smell the wonderful aromas, you know you’re getting a world-class coffee. The beans are also Rainforest Alliance certified, by the way.

Bufcoffee beans are grown in the Nyamagabe District, part of the Southern Province of Rwanda. The coffee bean trees are located in areas with an elevation of between 1,920 – 2,100 meters, and it’s this high elevation that gives the beans their crisp, complex flavor. Trust us when we say, there’s something special about these beans.

You see, growing coffee plants at higher elevations stresses the bushes, which results in a smaller yield of beans. The benefit to growing coffee fruit in conditions like this is that the beans that are produced have a more concentrated flavor, and a harder exterior – both desirable qualities in high-end coffee beans.

To understand this process better, think of the way stress impacts grape vines. The older the plant, the more the roots must fight for water, and the more stressed they become. Stressed vines produce fewer grapes, but the grapes that are produced are prized for their unique flavor.

If you’re like us, and you love a good pour-over coffee, you’re going to want to try this coffee ASAP. There’s just so much happening in the cup: yellow plum, apricot, champagne, cashew, pineapple and cane sugar flavors. And, on top of that, the acidity is well-structured and kind of tropical.

Sipping this ultra high-end coffee is truly delightful because the flavors just keep unfolding. It really is one of the most interesting beans we carry.

The Bufcoffee Cupping Score

Cupping is a system used to taste, evaluate and grade coffee, similar to, but not completely the same as a wine rating system. Aroma, flavor, body, acidity, and balance are all graded to give a coffee its cupping score.

Scores of 80 points are incredibly difficult to achieve. Coffees rated over 80 are considered specialty coffees, i.e.: the best of the best, and any coffee that approaches or surpasses 90 points is considered out-of-this-world good.

The Bufcoffee cupping score is an incredible 86.5. In other words, this is a coffee you’re going to want to tell all of your coffee-loving friends about.

AA grade coffee from small lots in Kenya.

The land is truly the star of the show in this coffee and the producers know it. Something in the soil gives beans grown here their iconic flavours and rather than messing with it, the producers get out of the way and let the coffee express itself. 

Once properly ripened, these Kenyan beans are Fully Washed, meaning they are stripped of all fruit and mucilage, leaving behind only the seed. This processing technique yields a very clean taste, showcasing the pure flavours of the terroir without any human influence.

What this means for you, is that the surprising tomato aroma is completely pure. All of the rich umami notes, the vibrant acidity and the sweet black grape tannins are are perfectly preserved in your cup: gifts from the Kenyan soil.

Explosive Coffee

Grown high above the potentially explosive Lake Kivu, is grown some truly fantastic gourmet coffee that delights at all roast levels. The beans are hand-picked and fully-washed (i.e. all pulp is fully removed before dying) ensures that the original taste of the beans are come out as cleanly as possible. At lighter roasts you get some very sweet dates and black tea, while darker roasts will savour signature peppery spice and cocoa.

Want a bit of terrifying trivia to go with your coffeee? The rich, smooth taste of this coffee partially comes from highly nutritious volcanic soils. And where you find volcanic soils, you find volcanoes. This wonderful soil happens to come from Mt Nyiragono, an active volcano on the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda.

Mt Nyiragono has steadily pumped 60 cubic kilometers of methane and 300 cubic kilometers of carbon dioxide in caverns under the lake. Then for good measure, laced these gasses with toxic hydrogen sulfide. During the last eruption, a small pocket of gas escaped the chamber and caused the lake to “boil” as it escaped. Should one day the gas chamber explode, say during another eruption or earthquake, 2.6  gigatonnes of carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere (about 5% of total global emissions, which is bad) and the toxic gas could kill millions of people in the surrounding region (very, very bad).

Red wine in your coffee cup – Mount Kilimanjaro

Coffee from Tanzania is grown right along the border of Kenya, just on the other side of the sacred Mount Kilimanjaro. You would be forgiven to think that Tanzanian coffee would taste similar to Kenyan, but you would be wrong. While there are distinctive flavours that both types share, the Tanzanian coffee surprises with much lower acidity and sweeter taste.

The high elevation at which this coffee is grown gives Mt Kilimanjaro beans a rich body and higher levels of natural sugars. These sugars, when roasted, turn to deeply chocolatey flavours. This makes Kilimanjaro coffees very flexible in terms of roasting. Roasted light will give bright acidity and fruitiness. When roasted darker the sugars caramelize and the acids evaporate, creating a completely different coffee with rich dark chocolate and a red wine-like acidity.

Every once in a while I come across a coffee that just blows my mind, one that makes me stop what I’m doing and wonder, how the hell did they do this? La Bastilla did this to me before I had even tasted it. At only 18 years old, La Bastilla has accomplished more good than I’ve done in my entire life and their work is inspiring. The company has rejuvenated two abandoned coffee plantations located out in the jungles and purposefully transformed them into bio-dynamic paradises; preserving the forests and native fauna while growing excellent coffee beans. Their efforts in sustainability have been certified by the Rainforest Alliance.

La Bastilla’s quest for coffee excellence wouldn’t be complete without a strong, supportive community however. When they realized their remote location offered no schools for their staff La Bastilla took it upon themselves to create one. They started small, offering pre-school and primary classes to their workers’ children but soon they discovered that the surrounding community were clamouring for a school as well so they opened it up for everyone, growing the school to support 200 students!

Far beneath the sparkling, mirror smooth surface of Lake Kivu, lies a smouldering volcano and a slumbering pocket of carbon-dioxide. At any moment a sudden tectonic shift may cause the CO2 to awaken violently, in a exploding in a cloud of ash and fury, destroying the lake, the forests and the coffee fields alike. Just thought you should know.

Assuming the bubble doesn’t burst in the next century (and smart people say it won’t), you will be able to continue to enjoy these superbly smooth AA grade beans. Roasted light brings out the floral smells of hand picking organic berries. Going a bit darker dries those berries and pours a thin layer of caramel over the surface. Roasting further to dark transforms the caramel into a melted 70%+ dark chocolate bar, dusted with dried berries.