Rwanda Huye

Long before Rwanda’s coffee sector became known for Bourbon quality nationwide, it was Huye District, the Southern Province area still known locally by its old name, Butare, that proved the model could work at all. In the Maraba sector, a group of smallholders organized in the years after the 1994 genocide to sell coffee together rather than through intermediaries. From 2001, the USAID-funded Partnership for Enhancing Agriculture in Rwanda through Linkages (PEARL) helped the cooperative, Abahuzamugambi, build Cyarumbo, Rwanda’s first specialty-focused washing station. By 2002 Maraba coffee carried the country’s first Fair Trade single-origin certification, and the cooperative has since grown to more than 1,500 members across four washing stations.

Huye’s second flagship story is newer and privately run. In 2011, agricultural technician David Rubanzangabo built a washing station on the slopes of Mount Huye itself, in the Sovu area. Huye Mountain Coffee now collects cherry from roughly 1,330 smallholders across 26 delivery points, nearly all growing Red Bourbon on quarter-hectare plots. The station runs both washed lots and, more recently, natural-processed micro-lots, a split unusual enough in Rwanda’s overwhelmingly washed-coffee export mix that it has become part of the district’s identity: a 2012 Huye Mountain lot placed second in Rwanda’s national Cup of Excellence in the washing station’s first competitive year.

Two independently published, dated Coffee Review lots give a real read on the cup. Stumptown’s 2016 lot scored 93, described as “delicately bright, richly sweet,” with tangerine zest, rhododendron, caramel, and almond over a juicy, balanced acidity. JBC’s 2023 lot, also 93, leaned more toward raspberry and cocoa nib, with a sweet-toned structure and a plush, syrupy mouthfeel. Both sit at the fuller-bodied, sweeter end of washed East African coffee, consistent with Rwanda’s broader Bourbon reputation, but the district’s altitude band runs higher and wider than Rwanda’s national typical range, one real reason growers here point to for the extra concentration in the cup.