
This special coffee was produced using coffee cherry from 130 smallholder farmers who deliver to the picturesque Nkara, Dukunde Kawa Cooperatives smallest and most remote washing station. Sitting in a valley at 1,880 meters above sea level, the site overlooks a beautiful landscape of rolling green hills dotted with farms and forests. Unlike most coffee-producing countries, where land size is used as a measure of scale, farms in Rwanda are often very small, and production capability is determined by the number of trees a farmer tends to. The majority of producers who contribute to the Nkara washing station own a couple of hundred trees, planted on one tenth of a hectare of land. This is a peaberry lot, which refers to the size and shape of the beans. Normally coffee seeds develop as a pair with flattened facing sides, but sometimes just one seed develops and forms an oval shape to occupy the entire space within the coffee cherry. This is called a peaberry and these small and round coffee beans are carefully selected and separated out from the rest of the crop during the milling stages.