October’s Specialty Estate coffee hails from Tanzania, an African country with a fascinating coffee history. Sharing a border with Ethiopia, aka the birthplace of arabica coffee, and Kenya, which produces some of the finest coffee in the world, coffee has shaped the lives of the Tanzanian people; especially the Haya people who grew and harvested coffee, most likely a robusta variety, long before colonisation. Instead of preparing the beans to be drunk, however, the Haya would chew on the cherry flesh to access the caffeine. They would also leave dried coffee beans in shrines and at burial sites as an offering to the deceased spirits. Though initially very resistant to replacing their crops with Arabica beans, in 1911 colonists passed a mandate forcing farmers to produce Arabica beans exclusively.
Since the 1920’s, co-ops have been forming in Tanzania to improve market access for producers, however it has taken the country achieving independence in 1964 and a number of attempts to increase production for Tanzanian coffee to take off internationally. The 1990’s saw a reform and privatisation in coffee exports in the region, allowing growers to sell more directly and receive a more reasonable fee for their beans.
This is especially important as Tanzania is famous primarily for it’s separated peaberry lots. Peaberries, such as those in this month’s Specialty Estate release, are a natural mutation occurring in between 5-12% of the yield where instead of 2 seeds developing at the centre of a coffee cherry, only one seed forms and the extra space allows it to develop into a round shape with a more potent flavour. Due to uniformity requirements, peaberries must be sorted and separated from their flat bean counterparts.
Harvested from May – September, this koffee has undergone a washed processing to remove their mucilage layer before drying.
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