Ninga – Burundi

In 2013, Long Miles Coffee opened the doors of their first washing station, Bukeye, in the Kayanza province of Burundi. From the start their goals were decisive; work within rural coffee growing communities to improve standards of living and coffee quality by sharing knowledge, providing better processing, and offering a higher pay for green coffee.

That first year of production they only worked with 50 farmers, but now they work directly with more than 14,000 coffee farming families within Burundi, Kenya, and Uganda. Eventually the Bukeye washing station became so well known among the community that farmers would walk as far as 15km with their coffee. For that reason, Long Miles opened a new washing station, Ninga, to make it easier for even more farmers to get fair compensation for their coffee.

Burundi, with its high altitudes, temperate weather, and proximity to other coffee growing countries like Kenya ,has always been considered a country that can produce incredible coffees. But injustice and poor farming practices that permeated the country’s newly privatized coffee industry made it difficult for roasters to be able to connect with growers and source high quality coffee. Long Miles Coffee works to fix that with their farmer-driven coffee production model, providing better access for farmers to get more for their harvest, increasing the quality and connecting them with roasters around the world.

This lot of Red Bourbon has been beautifully grown and processed in the high altitude regions of the Kayanza province. It’s a beautiful example of what coffee from Burundi can offer.