Mist Rising from the Forest Floor
My name is Negrita and I will be contributing to the Grounds for Burnt Offerings blog from Rwanda, where I live, I love, I laugh, I write. I also indulge in some serious coffee consumption.
Rwanda, also known as the ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’, is home to arguably the best coffee in the world. Rwanda provides an ideal climate for coffee cultivation, with its high altitudes, relatively temperate climate, and volcanic soils. The Arabica coffee grown here is primarily Bourbon and promotion of the coffee industry is a recent phenomenon, as the country has been in the process of rehabilitation and rebuilding since the 1994 Genocide.
Although Rwanda boasts great coffee, the coffee culture in Rwanda is still in its early stages, with most of the population being tea drinkers, culturally and habitually.
But over the last few years, as the country opens up to residents from all over the world, as it joins the East African Community and as it generally becomes more dynamic, a coffee culture has emerged that combines recognition of the hard-working coffee farmers of the country and a new-found appreciation of Rwanda’s role on the international coffee scene.
Rwanda, the land of a thousand hills is where I will be reporting from…
