A green‑coffee desk built around one cooperative.
We source, document, and ship a single grade of Burundi Single Origin Arabica — FW 15+, from COPROCAME's farmers in Muyinga Province. Every bag traceable to Kavugangoma. Every enquiry answered within 24 hours.
Specialty coffee is a paperwork industry.
Every claim a green-coffee supplier can make — altitude, varietal, screen grade, processing, cupping score, phytosanitary status, chain of custody — has a document behind it. The best operations produce every document without being asked. Most operations skip the documents nobody asks for.
Qahwa was founded in 2024 to trade one grade of one origin under a full document minimum. Our offer is narrow on purpose: FW 15+, from one cooperative, cupped and stamped by their own quality office, with an ICO certificate, a phytosanitary release, and a cupping report shipped alongside every sample.
A specialty roaster looking at a spec sheet should be able to trace every value back to its source. If they can't, we haven't done the trade properly.
COPROCAME — Coopérative pour la Promotion des Caféiculteurs Modèles et de leur Environnement — is a farmer-owned cooperative registered in Commune Nyawakuro, Zone Rugabano, in Muyinga Province, northeast Burundi. Their name translates directly: a cooperative for the promotion of model coffee farmers and their environment.
Membership is drawn from smallholder producers who each cultivate typically half a hectare to two hectares of Bourbon arabica at 1,600 – 1,900 metres. Cherry is delivered directly to Kavugangoma washing station, hand-sorted at intake, processed on the same day, and graded at the cooperative's own quality office before certification for export.
Every cupping report we publish carries their stamp — a circular blue seal with the Nyawakuro address and their national identification numbers. If you compare our lot data against theirs, the numbers line up. That's what the trade should look like.
COPROCAME · the farmers behind every bag.
Kavugangoma · where FW 15+ is made.
Kavugangoma is COPROCAME's washing station — the single point every lot we sell passes through. Fine washed (FW) is not a marketing grade. It's an East African processing category with a working definition, and every element of it can be verified against the phytosanitary and ICO documentation.
What FW 15+ actually means
Fine Washed: Cherry is depulped mechanically, fermented under water for 12 – 36 hours to remove the mucilage layer, then washed clean in graded channels. This is the classic East African wet process — the same protocol used by the Kenyan and Ethiopian washed lots that command specialty prices.
Screen 15 and up: After drying and hulling, the parchment is sorted through calibrated screens. Screen 15 refers to the 15/64 inch mesh — beans that pass over it, not through. Screen 15+ is the top ranking on the Burundi grading table, above screens 14, 12, and the smaller peaberry grades. Roughly the top 3% of Burundi's total output holds at this size.
Drying: Washed beans move to raised drying beds — not patios, not mechanical dryers. Twelve to twenty days of controlled sun exposure, turned by hand every hour during the intense midday, covered against night dew. The dry-milling that follows is done in Bujumbura before ICO certification and export.
The reason FW 15+ scores 83 – 86.5 on the SCA scale is that every stage from cherry to bagged parchment is done by people who cup coffee for a living, using equipment that's been calibrated for the same lot type year after year.
Muyinga Province sits in Burundi's northeast, on the same coffee belt that runs from Rwanda's south down through the Kivu highlands to the border with Tanzania. It's not the loudest of the Burundi provinces — Kayanza gets more attention, Ngozi more marketing — but Muyinga's terroir has a quiet, specific personality that shows up cup after cup.
The physical setting
Altitudes on the productive slopes range from 1,600 metres in the valleys to 1,900 metres on the ridge farms above Kavugangoma. Mean annual temperature is roughly 18 – 20°C, which is at the cooler end of the arabica window and keeps cherry maturation slow — the sugars have more time to develop before pick.
Burundi has a bimodal rainfall pattern: the long rains from March to May, and the short rains from September to November. This produces two flowerings but one main harvest, roughly from March through June, aligned with the second flowering's cherry ripening.
The varietal
The dominant varietal across Muyinga is Bourbon, introduced to Burundi from Réunion via the neighbouring Rwandan and Tanzanian coffee programmes in the mid-twentieth century. Some plots carry Jackson and Mibirizi selections — Bourbon derivatives selected for local disease resistance — but the cup profile stays consistent: floral aromatics, structured acidity, chocolate-tea mid-palate, medium body.
The cup
What Muyinga produces at FW 15+ is a coffee that reads clean on filter and holds up on espresso. Delicate florals on the aroma. Bright acidity, structured rather than sharp. Chocolate as the base note, tea in the finish. Peak lots — like 2610 this cycle — carry an "everlasting sweetness" that the COPROCAME cuppers flag in the report itself.
If you've cupped Rwandan Nyamagabe or Tanzanian Arusha, you know the family. Muyinga sits in that space, with a longer finish and a rounder acidity than the harder-edged washed Kenyans.
Muyinga Province · Burundi's northeast coffee belt.
The physical route every bag takes.
Burundi is landlocked. All export coffee moves by road to Bujumbura for certification, then by truck through Tanzania to Dar es Salaam for sea freight. From Dar es Salaam we route via Cape Town for South African trade or directly to Dubai for Gulf accounts. The trans-shipment via Dar es Salaam is recorded on the ICO certificate itself.
COPROCAME · Kavugangoma station
ODECA cert · ICO stamp · phytosanitary
Port entry · storage · sample release
Sheikh Zayed Road · Gulf allocation
Direct Bujumbura → Dubai routing is available for Gulf accounts on volumes above 5 tonnes, subject to sea-freight scheduling from Dar es Salaam.
Direct trade desk. Dubai.
Sheikh Zayed Road
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Reg. 2023/521392/07
Republic of South Africa