Crown Jewel Burundi Musumba Hill Bukeye Double Washed CJ1481 – Lot 1 *51962* – 27113 – SPOT RCWHSE

Position Spot

Boxes 0

Warehouses Oakland

Flavor Profile NULL

Out of stock

Overview 

This is a traditional washed coffee from Musumba Hill in Muramvya Province, Burundi. It is produced by 245 farmers organized around the Bukeye Washing Station in association with Long Miles Coffee Project. 

The flavor profile is on the delicate side for Burundian coffees, showcasing elegant apricot and peach notes with a strong caramel sweetness and silky mouthfeel. 

Our roasters found the high density beans benefited from hotter charge temperatures and, with plenty of heat early, could coast gently in later stages of roasting. 

When brewed, our barista team found the coffee exceptional on multiple pour-over devices, and ideal for extraction as espresso. 

Taste Analysis by Chris Kornman 

I’ll be the first to admit that after more than seven seasons sourcing Burundi coffee, this is the first from Muamvya province I’ve had the pleasure to taste. And what a pleasure it is. 

The plurality of our team, from cupping to brewing regardless of equipment type found prominent stone fruit notes in the cup. Notably, the coffee showcases an elegant apricot flavor, followed by tastes of cherry, plum, and peach, and accented by delicate-but-present citrus flavors of tangerine and lemon. 

If all this daintiness sounds a little too timid for those seeking a bold cup, fear not, as the silky, juicy body will surely win you over. In fact, this pairing of complex and high-toned fruit flavors in the absence of overbearing acids, and (importantly) with the augmentation of exceptional viscosity is exactly why we knew this coffee from Musumba hill would be a perfect addition to our espresso menu. 

There is an extremely limited quantity of this small batch, so if your heart is set on a balanced and imminently clean cup regardless of how you roast and filter it, don’t sleep on this selection. 

Source Analysis by Charlie Habegger 

Bukeye Coffee Washing Station was the first processing site built by the Long Miles Coffee Project (LMCP), in January of 2013, on the border of Muramvya and Kayanza provinces. Since the beginning, Bukeye has been a locus of innovation in everything from drying bed construction to methods for helping farmers reduce the Potato Taste Defect through pest management on their farms.  

The station was hand-built by local farmers with bricks made of clay from the surrounding valley, all of whom now deliver cherry for processing every year. Bukeye uses a borehole on property as a source of fresh water. The station currently has over 100 employees, most of whom, like the station’s builders, come from smallholder farming families in the surrounding hills.  

Musumba is one such hill, whose distance from Bukeye station creates a very long and difficult traverse for farmers: over 8 kilometers of narrow foot paths and steep slopes to deliver, for most, only what they can physically carry that day. Farmers come despite the difficulty, however, because of their preference for selling to Long Miles, who has invested directly in farm-level quality in their community, and who they feel is the most hopeful partnership of their local options.  

LMCP is a microlot business. All of their infrastructure, systems, employees, and marketing are designed to support large numbers of unique and fully traceable coffees. Doing so in Burundi is especially difficult because farms produce very little cherry and are scattered across broad landscapes and steep terrain. They are also numerous, requiring the successful coordination of hundreds of farmers and processing staff just to produce a single differentiated lot. Importantly, such an effort requires sustainable prices to support, so the coffee itself needs to be as delicious as possible to justify the price. And the impact needs to be clearly communicated. Fortunately, LMCP excels at identifying landscapes and communities with potential, and investing heavily in farmer livelihood. With this formula they are easily producing many of the country’s best coffees each year, as well as making an obvious impact on farm health, farmer livelihood, and small-scale financial sustainability for growers. 

LMCP organizes their farmer base by the hills they live on, designating delivery days of the week for each microregion. This is common practice for processors in Burundi, but unlike most, LMCP separates every hill and delivery day until processing is complete and a quality assessment has been made. All farmer partners with LMCP and receive not only highly competitive prices and post-harvest premiums for their cherry, but also farm-level trainings covering canopy and fertilizer development, pruning, harvesting for quality, and integrated pest management. These trainings are all provided by local “Coffee Scouts”, LMCP’s team of community-based trainers who serve as local instructors, and which was created during the first years of Bukeye’s operation. The education and high prices combined have helped many of LMCP’s farmers renew their faith in coffee as a long-term livelihood. Long Miles now works with a total of 5,500 farmers between their three washing stations, servicing 11 different hills.  

Cherry from the surrounding farmers is floated and hand-sorted for maximum ripeness upon delivery to Bukeye. Once the cherry is depulped the parchment undergoes a 12-hour dry fermentation. After fermentation is complete the parchment is typically “footed” or agitated by dancing barefoot in the parchment to help the decomposed mucilage completely detach. Once the agitation is complete, the parchment is rinsed in fresh water, graded by density, and left to soak another 4-6 hours in a final rinse tank. Post soak, the parchment is moved to shaded drying beds to allow residual surface water to evaporate, during which it is hand-sorted for any insect damage and visual imperfections. Parchment is then moved again to the larger beds with no shade to dry completely, a process that typically takes 16-20 days.  

Green Analysis by Chris Kornman 

Surviving an extra-long journey from Burundi to Oakland, this coffee is evidence that good drying practices really matter. Its delicate, sweet flavor profile has been elegantly preserved by steady processing and post-harvest handling. We have here a dense coffee, with low moisture and a classic 15+ Burundi style screen size. 

Local cultivars are largely traditional and legacy plants handed down generationally since the 1930s and 40s. Widely assumed to be predominately French Mission (Bourbon) variants, World Coffee Research has uncovered deeper histories into the two most common local iterations grown in Burundi and nearby Rwanda. Jackson (a Bourbon type plant) is the surname of coffee farmer in India who identified the tree as rust-resistant; seedlings were then sent to other British occupied coffee growing regions in Kenya and Tanzania. Mbrizi (a Typica type) is thought to have been introduced from Guatemala to Rwanda. Neither tree is considered disease resistant, but both tend to produce excellent cup quality despite relatively low yields. 

Diedrich IR-5 Analysis by Doris Garrido 

I admit that Musumba was my second favorite from our Burundi sample roast table, and I agree with the team that it would do a great espresso on bar, but that was before I did my first trial roast. Now, I would brew it as a pour over in the morning, and the reason why is because lately I have been enjoying brewing some clean and fruit-forward coffee on the v60 or any other manual brewers – probably a phase that I got since the Covid lock down. I haven’t been an espresso client since. Going back to Musumba, I am going to start with the tasting notes just to clarify why on the roast trial I enjoyed this one a lot better. 

On the citric side we got apricot, bright cherry, lemon, mandarin, orange zest, tamarind. And on the sweet side: golden raisin, melon, peach, plum. My favorite note was that this coffee is somehow delicate and elegant! 

As for roast analysis, we roast in batches of 5.5 lbs. I have chosen to charge 421F with 100% gas for this roast. I kind of like this area of gas and charge temperatures, and in this one I wanted to include 50% air  before the turning point. We are expecting to taste airflow differences in the cup, and I personally think we do, but we will keep researching. 

With my turning point on the Diedrich at 1:24 / 193F, I was more than happy. Dropping gas first at 225F and a minute later to the lowest settign (30%) with no more gas movements for the rest of the roast, I just opened 100% airflow after first crack. I spent 4:26 minutes drying, 4:09 on yellowing, and Musumba started cracking at 382.3F. I decided to give it 1:35 seconds of development and drop it at 391F. I was skeptical of the color track reading 57.27 for ground coffee, but as I have been learning, sometimes you have to wait until you cup: the next day it was nice and clean on the cupping table. Burundi Musumba is going to hit the menu at the Crown in the following weeks, a complex coffee to try.

Aillio Bullet R1 IBTS Analysis by Evan Gilman 

Unless otherwise noted, we use both the roast.world site and Artisan software to document our roasts on the Bullet. You can find our roast documentation below, by searching on roast.world, or by clicking on the Artisan links below.  

Generally, we have good results starting our 500g roasts with 428F preheating, P6 power, F2 fan, and d6 drum speed. Take a look at our roast profiles below, as they are constantly changing! 

This week’s coffees from Burundi are a phenomenal addition to the lineup of Crown Jewels. If you’re looking for versatile, fresh, and delicious summer offerings (or just drinkables), this is the best place to start. Burundi may be a small country, and one that people often forget is part of East Africa, but its coffees are as memorable as any in the world.  

For this week’s roasts, I tried a different approach. While I started with the usual 500g of coffee and 428F charge temperature, I used d4 drum speed for the duration of the roast – much slower than usual. This resulted in more contact between the coffee and the drum, and while there could be a concern of uneven development, I attempted to compensate for this with a slow and even Post-Crack Development stage. The challenge I experienced here was in introducing plenty of heat at the beginning of the roast, then slowly reducing heat application and increasing airflow during the course of the cycle.  

By first crack, I had decreased heat to P5 and increased airflow to P5. Despite this action, there was a relatively large spike in RoR before First Crack, followed by a strong dip once the superheated moisture released during crack had dissipated. To compensate, I reduced airflow slightly to P4 to continue the roast in Post-Crack Development gently for a few more seconds. The result was a ratio of 42% / 37% / 19% of Green/Maillard/PCD, for nearly 2 minutes of development on this 10-minute roast. My final temperature was quite low at 397F, but I didn’t detect any underdeveloped notes in the cup here. 

In fact, this roast turned out to be super delicious. While hot, plenty of smooth honey and date sweetness came through, with a touch of orange marmalade zestiness. Upon cooling, the body and sugary consistency of milk chocolate came through, and when fully cold, a curious bubblegum or dried papaya note peeked through the wall of sugar.  

Roasting with such low drum speed on a batch this size is a risky proposition, but I seem to have gotten lucky here. The roast turned out to be evenly developed, tasty, and satisfying, but I would recommend against using such low drum speed unless you’re adventurous. This coffee’s consistent processing and drying processes went a long way to making a peachy yet unimpeachable roast! 

https://roast.world/@egilman/roasts/NCdsRfnXp23O45BT4PzvM 

 

Ikawa Pro V3 Analysis by Chris Kornman 

Standard practice these days for Ikawa roasting is to put our Crown Jewels through a gamut of 4 reliable profiles at what we’d consider to be “drinkable” sample roast levels. The profiles have been developed and refined over time to showcase the best of various green metrics and processing styles to give us a window into their performance on our production roasters. 

This week, in addition to writing analyses for coffees from one of my favorite places on the planet, I’m teaching a series on Green Coffee analysis to a small group of students. One of the metrics we focus on is density, and the way that green density can impact heat absorption and roasting progress. 

For high density coffees, like this Burundi from Musumba Hill, I tend to prefer roasts that start with high charge temperatures and progress fairly quickly through Maillard reactions. To demonstrate this, in the class we taste a high and low density coffee roasted to two profiles: (A) High Charge & Fast Maillard and (B) Low Charge and Slow Maillard. 

As you can probably guess, this Burundi proved a classic example of the principle. The faster roast (only about 30-40 seconds in total) produced a more complex, bright, and clean cup with pristine flavor notes and elegant sweetness. By contrast, the lower charge, slower roast (L/S below) produced a slightly muddled flavor profile with a dryer finish and mellower acidity. 

You can try out the roasts yourself, and agree or disagree with my theories as you like by clicking the links below: 

Roast 1: Crown Inlet Sample Roast L/S 

Roast 2: Crown Inlet Sample Roast 2022 

 

Brew Analysis by Carolyn McBride 

For my first brew of this delicious double-washed process Burundi Musumba, I decided to use our current dial for our pour over bar here at The Crown, at 19 grams in and 300 grams out using a Hario V60. We did a pulse of 50 grams of water, followed by another of 150 grams at 40 seconds, and another 100 grams of water at 1:40. The team was tasting a lot of delicate juicy fruits, such as apricot, plum, and papaya. There was also a lemongrass zingy-ness which combined with a lovely molasses finish, resulting in a delicate but hearty feeling cup.  

For the second brew, I used a Fellow Stagg. I wanted to see what this coffee would taste like with a slightly lower extraction percentage and have noticed that the flat-bottomed Fellow Stagg is good for adding a little more gravity to a pour over. I lowered the dose to 18 grams, which ended up being enough to tone down the molasses characteristics and bring out a dainty nuttiness, while still maintaining the sweet stone fruit tasting notes and juicy acidity. Our barista team tasted notes of oolong, macadamia, raisin, lemongrass, and tangerine. 

I was interested in brewing this coffee using a Bee House coffee dripper and was surprised to find that this was our favorite out of the three brews we made! It had obvious sweetness that came through in notes of dark cherry, melon, and plum. The complexity of this brew just kept giving, with notes of deep red wine and sweet tobacco. I was intrigued to find that this also was the slowest brew, at 4 minutes and 38 seconds. 

These three brews proved to us that this coffee is extremely dynamic and maintains a harmony of flavors no matter how it’s brewed. I would expect this coffee to be a great option for espresso, given the cherry sweetness and consistent nougat-y notes throughout each brew. I also would love to try this as a nitro infused cold brew—I would expect some creamy cherry almond ice cream notes. Perfect for summertime.