Rwanda - Gito FW

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Omni, suitable for filter and sweet classic style espresso

Light-Medium Roaster Influence:
Roasted slightly slower and longer than our other East African coffees to aim more towards brown sugar, lower acidity and comforting flavours, without tasting roast character. 

Best Rested: 2-3 weeks

For Filter: 95°C, 62g/L when fresh, when well rested you can go down to 91°C and 60g/L

For Espresso: 18g, 40g out, 32-34s trad style

We’re tasting: Aromas of marmalade, dark fruits and toffee. In the cup it's buttery bodied and very sweet, with distinct notes of plum crumble, stewed apple and milk chocolate. As it cools the sugary notes evolve to fruity muscovado.

Traceability

The Story

Muraho Trading Company was founded in 2015 by brothers Karthick and Gaudam Anbalagan, whose family has worked in East African coffee for over three decades. Their father established operations for a Swiss-based coffee company across Rwanda, Burundi, and Uganda after moving the family from Uganda to Rwanda in 1996.

The brothers grew up around coffee warehouses before leaving for secondary school and university in New Zealand, where they encountered speciality café culture and noticed how underrepresented Rwandan coffee was in Australasian roasting. Karthick returned to East Africa to manage logistics across Burundi and Rwanda; Gaudam started a coffee trading company in Wellington. The two paths converged when they built their first washing stations, Kilimbi and Rugali, in Nyamasheke District in early 2016.

Muraho now operates eight washing stations across three districts, including Shyira at 1850 metres above sea level, reportedly Rwanda's highest, and Vunga, a female-led cooperative of 260 members that MTCo. has partnered with since 2017. They completed their own dry mill at Rugali in 2019, with the intention of locating milling infrastructure upcountry rather than in Kigali - creating employment and permanent jobs where the coffee is actually produced (we're huge fans of moves like this)

It is at this dry mill where the Gito programme takes shape: after screen sorting, the 13/14 fraction is separated and then density sorted to isolate only the highest grade beans before passing through electronic colour sorting and hand sorting to remove defects.

Rwanda's coffee grading system assigns speciality status based on screen size, with beans needing to pass screen 15 or above for general export-quality speciality. Anything smaller is typically relegated to the domestic commodity market at dramatically lower prices, despite coming from the same trees, the same soil, the same altitude, and the same farmer's labour. In a country where the average coffee plot is around a quarter of a hectare and there are no large estates to speak of, the difference between commodity and speciality pricing at farm gate is incredibly meaningful.

Rwanda's coffee is entirely smallholder produced, grown by an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 farmers, and population growth continuously fragments landholdings through inheritance. Coffee competes directly with food crops for the same scarce land, so *any* mechanism that increases the proportion of a harvest reaching speciality pricing, without requiring additional inputs or labour from the farmer, has a truly impactful effect on household income.

The Gito Project functions entirely at the post-harvest milling stage. It recovers value from beans that already exist in the supply chain but would otherwise be lost to conventional grading logic. Raw Material, the UK-based non-profit (community interest company) green coffee importer through whom we purchase this coffee, co-developed the concept with Muraho (alongside the roaster partner who helped fund the start of Raw Material UK).

When we set out to build our house filter range, we needed coffees that could deliver consistently excellent daily drinking while supporting meaningful change in coffee-growing regions. This is our third harvest purchasing Gito, and the project continues to represent something we find structurally compelling about how value moves through the speciality supply chain.

Having used it purely as a Facility component for the first two seasons, we kept hitting the QC cupping table thinking "wow! this really could stand up to being a single origin release" - and it's a joy to finally make this happen.