Kirambo Site - Lot 339, Nyamasheke District, Rwanda | Washed FSC-9294

-----

Location:	Nyamasheke
Producer:	Kirambo site
Varietal:	Red Bourbon
Process:	Washed
Altitude:	1545
Production/Harvest Date:	2026
Cup Score:	86.5
Cup profile:	Peach ice tea, lime, cranberry, butterscotch

Rwanda's coffee story reaches back to the early 1900s, when German missionaries first introduced arabica to the region. It has never been a volume player — Rwanda accounts for only about 0.2% of global arabica — but coffee has long been the country's most important cash crop and a key source of export earnings. Over the past two decades, hundreds of thousands of smallholder plots feeding some 300 wet mills have given Rwanda a reputation for clean, bright, floral cups with a distinctive black-tea character. That's a striking shift from just fifteen years ago, when the bulk of the harvest was washed on the farm and shipped as commodity-grade coffee. Kirambo sits in the Western Province, the mountainous belt rising off the shoreline of Lake Kivu. With the lake itself at 1,460m and slopes climbing past 2,000m, the West is Rwanda's traditional heartland — historically its largest producing region — and the high altitude, reliable rainfall, and cool climate make it well suited to growing quality coffee. More background on Rwanda as an origin, and on our work there, is available here: https://falconcoffees.com/rwanda-origin/ Kirambo's coffee is delivered through Rwanda Trading Company (RTC), Rwanda's largest coffee exporter, founded in 2009 and built on a focused approach to quality, traceability, and farmer partnership through owned and partner wet mills across the country.

Kirambo sits on a hillside whose land runs down to the shores of Lake Kivu. The station was built in 2008, but for many years it ran without stability: the owner lacked the working capital to finance it, and it was rented out to different operators year after year. Through all that time, farmers had no consistent partner to support them beyond the purchase of their cherry. 

More on RTC: https://rwandatc.com/about.php