For our next rotating single origin we have chosen to highlight a Rwanda Musasa Natural coffee using the Aeropress brewing method in an inverted fashion.

Farm and Coffee Profile

This coffee comes from Dukunde Kawa Musasa, a Co-operative in the Gakenke region of Northern Rwanda. This co-op is one of Rwanda's largest with more than 2,100 members. Where a majority of the farms are from, 5,577 to 6,562 feet above sea level.

”'Dukunde kawa' means "Let's Love Coffee" in the Kinyarwanda language, in reference to the power of coffee to improve the lives of farmers in rural communities.” -OLAM

Dukunde Kawa Musasa Cooperative was founded in 2000, in 2003 the co-op built a washing station for the coffee and in 2004 became fair trade certified. This co-op is largely woman led with more than 80 percent females of whom work alongside the gorilla inhabited mountains

running the day to day operations of coffee farming and other goods on their farms.

This coffee we selected was one of this co-ops’ natural processed beans :

“Ripe cherries are hand sorted and floated to separate by density, selecting only the highest quality for processing. The cherries are then dried in the sun on raised African beds for 20-25 days, allowing many of the sugars from the fruit to transfer into the bean, giving the coffee a sweet and jammy profile. During this period the cherries must be constantly turned and sorted to ensure consistent drying and prevent over-fermentation. Specialty natural processing is somewhat unusual for Rwanda, which has seen a surge in fully washed processing since the year 2,000.” - OLAM

When harvest time comes near each member of the Co-op will gather all their ripe cherries and bring it to one of the three washing stations, where a sorting processes is then initiated to get rid of any bad fruit(cherries).

Roast style

This is my first time ever roasting a natural Rwanda and I am such a huge fan of Rwanda coffees in general, I really wanted to nail it. Like really… really nail it. Plus, we received this shipment right at the start of the quarantine so I’ve had quite a bit of time to develop and play with it. In fact, we had so much time to work with this coffee, I took some green coffee over to Will, at Press Coffee for him to roast up so we could compare notes.

We started off with 6 lbs batch in the roaster to get the hang of it, that profile is shown below:

Cupping Notes: TROPICAL FRUITS, POWDERED SUGAR, CITRUS w/ Aggressive acidity.

One thing to note before we dive in: the darker curves are those of the current roast, while the lighter curves are the ones used for reference points. As such, as you can see, our new Rwanda roasted.. a little bit different from our pre-loaded profile. Which is fine for a first-time roast, however, if this were production, it would need to be cupped and evaluated before it could leave the warehouse. Another thing to note is natural coffees are notorious for being a ‘little wild’, both in flavor but also in the roaster. The addition of quakers into the beans makes the differences from bean to bean more dramatic than say a nice washed, dense Central-American coffee, which is very consistent from bean to bean and roasts a lot more consistently. This can be helped literally just by roasting larger batches as those differences from bean to bean get smaller and smaller in their impact on the measuring instruments, but that doesn't mean the coffee is any better or worse. That just means some of the curves are a little ‘jumpy’ looking on smaller roasts and more smoothed out on larger batches. Finally, I can say from cupping this coffee, I really like the flavors and the body but the acidity was a little overpowering, I would like to shoot for a slightly longer roast time as well as a slightly higher end temperature (it’s hard to see on the graph, but it should read 390F) on my next try. This will allow a little more of a relaxed flavor profile and hopefully a little more balance to the acidity.

Our next roast was an 18lb roast, as this was the same size that the roaster, Will, at Press Coffee Roasters uses, so I wanted it to be as close to what he was doing so we could compare actual roast data points. They also roast on a Probat p12, only a few years older than ours, but use a different profiling software.

That profile looked like this:

Cupping Notes: BRIGHT, PINEAPPLE, PLUM, ORANGE, JUICY. The bright acidic notes, but nicely balanced.
Also, no background profile on this one, We dont do alot of 18lb roasts actually (mostly 24lb and 12 lbs) so I may not even have had a profile that I wanted to use while roasting for reference. Dangerous , I know, I’m a real cowboy)

As you can see from this graph though, I feel like we did a decent job accomplishing our 2 earlier goals stated, the roast time is 30 seconds longer while the end temperature of 397F, as opposed to 390F. Also, look how nice and even our curves look. Science!

Sadly, I do not have the notes or profile for Wills coffee as the profile was a print out and has since been lost or tossed out, but also... that really wasn't the purpose of this exercise but something completely different. But if we do it again , maybe I will do a write up about it.

This did end up being the production roast profile we went forward with. We had to scale it up to a 24 lb roast, but those changes are made in starting charge temp and gas changes, the curves all look pretty much the exact same as those in the profile above.

Brewing Method

This month we decided to used the Aeropress brewing method (inverted)

A little history of the Aeropress:

This little device was invited by Alan Adler in 2005 with the intention to reduce the bitterness within coffee. While one way to do this is with the method of cold brew which changes the structure based on the temperature of water added more than any other component. Cold brew however can take up to 24 hrs depending on method. Adler's method of change came with a strong focus on brew time. In order to reduce brew time without over extracting the grinds pressure from human force (like the first espresso machines) is added to the Aeropress mechanics which increases brew time therefore theoretically reducing the bitterness in the final cup.

What you need:

AeroPress brewer
AeroPress filter
Grinder
30g of coffee
Hot water just off the boil (about 205°F)
AeroPress paddle or spoon
Timer
Mug

Processes

Choosing to use an inverted approach to the aeropress with a water bypass at the end helps this Rwanda come to its fullest flavors and depths.

Grind size is in between table salt and kosher salt depending on the grinder, the setting will vary from home to home. Preferably slightly finer than french press coffee. We found that using a 1:6 ratio of coffee to water worked best for this roast and coffee.

- Prepare set ratio of 1:6 for example 30g of ground coffee to 180ml of water

- Grind between 5-0 min before brewing to ensure all flavors stay inside the cup
- Pre wet the aeropress filter with hot water
- Add coffee grinds to bottom of aeropress tube

- Place on scale
- Add 100ml of hot water (198-205°f)
- Start timer
- Stir coffee in chamber vigorously 20 times

- Put cap (bottom) on aeropress
- Carefully push exas air out of aeropress
- At the 40 sec mark on the timer
- Flip aeropress in nearby cup

- Push the rest of the air/water out of the aeropress into the cup bellow
- Remove aeropress container from cup

- Add 80ml of hot water (197°f) to the cup
- Transfer into drinking vessel
- Sip/Slurp/Drink!

Tasting Notes

The tasting notes on this coffee using a 1:6 ratio is as follows:

Plum

Hot Chocolate

Cinnamon

Blood Orange

Thanks for reading all the way to the end ! The Rwanda Musasa Has been added to our Coffee Ordering page so go getcha some if you wanna try for yourself!

Rotating Single Origin Highlight: Rwanda Musasa Natural