A Sweet, Warming (and fruity) Brew

As I write this, the summer is fading into fall and I find myself needing something a bit warmer to get me through the day. This coffee from Hama certainly fits the mood, being a bean that not only warms you up but is also quite sweet (if you put sugar in your coffee better hold back with this one). Smelling these beans reminds me of a (hot?) mixed berry smoothie with aromas of summery white and yellow flowers. There’s a fall aftertaste of sweet tangerines layered into the cup as well.

Why Is Hama So Sweet?

Grown in the birthplace of Arabica coffee, coffees here enjoy an average temperature ranging from 16.5 to 18.5 °C and an annual rainfall of around 1600 ml (that’s not much). Trying to mature coffee cherries in such a cold environment greatly prolongs the maturation process, resulting in a high concentration of sugar. 

Local producers employ natural processing (leaving the pulp on the bean) for 21 days during the dry season. This further concentrates the sugar and ferments the pulp, embedding a fruity acidity in the resulting beans. Careful hand-picking then safeguards the quality, ensuring a sweet and fruity coffee.

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).