I’m going to ask you to find Burundi on a map. If you’re like most coffee drinkers—and let’s be honest, most coffee professionals—you can’t do it. You know it’s in East Africa. You know it’s small. You might know it shares a border with Rwanda, which you can probably find because its specialty coffee recovery story has been told to death. But Burundi remains a blank spot in the mental geography of the specialty world. That’s a problem, because Burundi produces some of the finest coffee on the planet, and almost nobody is paying attention.
The country is roughly the size of Maryland. It holds between 600,000 and 800,000 smallholder coffee farmers, each working about a third of an acre. That’s maybe two hundred trees per family. Many have fewer than a hundred. These aren’t plantations; they’re gardens. From these gardens, processed through a network of washing stations that were largely destroyed during a twelve-year civil war and rebuilt via private investment, comes coffee that regularly scores 86 to 92 points on the SCA scale. It’s quality parity with Kenya, sold at prices closer to Rwanda. Burundi is the most undervalued coffee origin on Earth. Its story is how a country tries to rebuild itself, one washing station at a time.
“Burundi is, by any rational measure, the most undervalued coffee origin on Earth.”
The War That Stopped Everything
Burundi’s coffee history follows a pattern that’s depressingly familiar in East Africa: colonial introduction, post-independence decline, brief recovery, and devastating war. Coffee arrived in the 1930s under Belgian rule. After independence in 1962, farmers abandoned coffee in defiance of their former rulers, and productivity collapsed. The World Bank financed about 150 washing stations in the 1980s, building the infrastructure for quality. Then, in October 1993, Burundi’s first democratically elected president, Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated after only one hundred days in office.
The civil war that followed lasted twelve years. An estimated 300,000 people died. Coffee plantations were abandoned by the thousands. Washing stations fell into disrepair or were destroyed outright. By 2005, the coffee sector was in ruins. Whatever infrastructure survived the 1980s had been looted or lost to the forest.
This is where the story should have ended—another African origin relegated to low-grade commodity production, sold for a pittance on the C-market. It didn’t end that way. Burundi looked at Rwanda, which rebuilt its sector from two washing stations in 2000 to 187 by 2010, and decided that specialty coffee could do the same for them.
Pierre Nzeyimana and the Nkanda Washing Station
Here is the part of the Burundi story that gets specific. The part that moves from macroeconomics to one person, one washing station, and 1,253 smallholder farmers. Pierre Nzeyimana grew up in the Kayanza province, in the north of Burundi, where coffee is as common as grass. He was not a farmer—he was a trader, a businessman. He watched the privatization of Burundi’s washing stations in the mid-2000s and saw an opportunity.
In 2010, he built the Nkanda washing station. The elevation in Kayanza sits between 1,700 and 1,900 meters. The soil is red clay-loam, iron-rich and slightly acidic. The Bourbon variety—which constitutes nearly all of Burundi’s coffee—grows there in full sun and in forest shade, depending on the farmer. The cherries from 1,253 registered smallholders, each farming about a third of a hectare, flow to Nkanda during the main crop season between May and August.
“The Nkanda washing station is not a facility. It is a community institution—the social and economic anchor of 1,253 families.”
The water source for Nkanda is a natural spring at the top of the hill, gravity-fed through a ceramic filter into the receiving tanks. The fermentation canal is concrete, shaded by a corrugated metal roof to prevent temperature spikes. After fermentation, the beans are washed and moved to raised drying beds—African drying beds, wood-framed, mesh-topped—where they dry in the mountain sun for 30 to 35 days.
In the Cup
Burundian coffee, when it’s processed carefully at a station like Nkanda, has a flavor profile that sits somewhere between Kenya and Rwanda: the brightness of a well-washed East African coffee, the stone-fruit sweetness of high-altitude Bourbon, and a clean, tea-like finish that makes you want to brew another cup before the first one’s gone. Q-graders score lots from Nkanda between 87 and 92 points. At Contour, we cup it blind whenever we’re evaluating East African offerings, and it consistently surprises buyers who expect Kenya.
“To drink Burundian coffee from Nkanda is to drink the story of a country that rebuilt itself, one cherry at a time.”