Santa's Slay - Gito - Rwanda

In Rwanda, Raw Material work alongside Muraho Trading Co. This partnership helps affiliate co-operatives increase their quality of production, fetch a higher price for their coffee, and introduce them to new markets. This will be a continuous work in progress in the coming years, as we gain a greater understanding of the particular challenges Rwandan coffee producers face.

Through this process, we can develop a model that creates incentives that generate producer buy-in, all the while maximising impact. We supply coffee from across Muraho’s washing stations, which are located in the Nyamasheke, Gakenke, and Nyabihu regions of Rwanda.

The Gito coffees are something new for us at Raw Material. Finding new markets for coffee in order to generate increased profits for producers is a key part of our work. The Gito blend comes from three of MTCo’s beautiful stations in Nyamasheke District, Rugali, Kilimbi, and Gisheke. This screen size, 13-14, is usually sent straight to the commodity market. Having isolated the cherries, we found a hidden gem that we are thrilled to share with you. 

Gito means ‘tiny’ in Kinyarwanda. Traditionally, this screen selection has been sorted and sold to the commodity market, based on its size alone. To ensure we could maximise the volumes we could provide to the specialty market (and in turn return better profits to those who produced them) we decided to isolate these coffees and see for ourselves. Sorted by density, we collected the highest density grade and found these coffees to be a delight. We are now thrilled to offer these hidden gems to our specialty customers.

All cherry is hand-sorted before a pre-pulp float, underripe or damaged cherry is removed, along with any foreign objects. For the Gito washed, the cherry is then floated in pre-pulping tanks removing any floaters and later pulped. Next, coffee is fermented in dedicated concrete fermentation tanks for an average of 12 hours. After fermentation, coffee is released into a large serpentine grading channel. This process also separates parchment into different density grades.