Ethiopia Danbi Uddo Triple Washed Red Cherry Crown Jewel is sourced from family-owned farms organized around Testi Trading PLC, a coffee mill located in the town of Danbi Uddo near the town of Shakiso within the Guji Zone of the Oromia Region, Ethiopia. Coffee producers deliver their ripe cherries to the Testi Trading coffee mill station where the cherries are sorted and pulped. After pulping, the beans are fermented for 36 to 48 hours and then washed. The wet beans in parchment are placed on raised drying beds in thin layers and turned every 2 to 3 hours during the first few days of the drying process. Depending on the weather, the beans are dried for 10 to 12 days until the moisture in the coffee beans is reduced to 11.5 percent.  Then the beans are transported to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to be milled and bagged prior to export.

Rwanda Musasa Mbilima Dukunde Kawa Triple Washed Crown Jewel is sourced from family-owned farms organized around the Mbilima mill located near a gorilla habitat in the Gakenke district of Rwanda.  Farmer plots are so small that measurements are based on the numbers of trees, not the area of land. Farmers who process their coffee at the Mbilima mill are members of the Dukunde Kawa Cooperative, which started in 2000 with enough funds to build one wet mill.  In the following years, the Dukunde Kawa Cooperative has built three more wet mills(including the Mbilima mill) and completed construction of their own dry mill. More than 80 percent of the cooperative workforce is women, and producer-members have used earnings to improve their standards of living with investments in livestock, access to healthcare, and programs to protect the environment, which won the SCAA 2012 Sustainability Award.  The quality of the coffee is also internationally recognized, consistently placing as one of the best in the Cup of the Excellence auction each year.

Since 1971, the Vohora’s have owned about 1000 acres of farmland on the southern exterior slopes of the Ngorongoro caldera near the town of Karatu in Tanzania’s lush rift valley. The farms possess Rainforest Alliance certificate, and the family and their 50+ full-time employees on the farm have done a remarkable job of upkeep and preservation of natural beauty while also running a thriving coffee business. They are diversifying into Macadamia, provide temporary housing for harvest labor, and even supply land on the farm for local smallholders to grow beans – a mutually beneficial crop as the legumes fix nitrogen in the soil, a critical step in a healthy cycle of crops.

The coffees the Vohora family produce achieve consistently high quality from year-to-year despite a number of uncommon obstacles. Water shortages prompted new rainwater basins at critical high points on the farm a few years ago. Animal damage of the coffee trees is frequent and traumatic – usually, it’s the water buffalo that are most destructive in herds, though you can catch the sounds of an occasional elephant at night, making its way through the forest.