Gasharu

Valentin Kimenyi manages his family’s company, Gasharu Coffee. Though his father and owner of the company, Celestin, is not an agronomist, he has always received calls from coffee farmers to advise on farming and processing due to his experience in farming. Today Valentin is giving farming advice too. The story of Gasharu goes back to 1976, when 17 years old Celestin bought his first plot and planted 380 coffee trees. He left his mother to work for a family in the capital, Kigali, in 1973. He had lost his father during the 1959 uprising that led to Rwanda’s independence and the family was in hardship. It took him 3 days to walk from his village to Kigali and 3 years to see his mother again. When Celestin was back, he invested all his savings in land and coffee and started working with local brokers. “My father has been business-minded since his boyhood. His only options were tea and coffee and it was his location that made him choose the latter,” Valentin explains. Celestin started working with cherry collection and trading in 1978. “Locals would sell cherries or parchment by cups known as Mironko. It was assumed that one cup was the equivalent to 1kg but there were no scales available.”

Coffee plantations in the Gasharu region benefit from their proximity to the continuous of Nyungwe National Park. They get a good amount of rainfall to make the cherries juicier and the coffee fruity.

The cherries selected for this lot are collected at altitudes between 1700 m and 2100 m. When they are received at the washing station they are sorted and floated to ensure consistent and good density beans are separated from the others. These beans undergo intense sorting at the pre-drying tables and are later dried on the raised African beds for 25-30 days. Once dried, the coffee is well kept and stored in good conditions before being hulled and sorted by well-trained women and then packed in GrainPro and Jute bags for export. The processing at the washing station is carried out by young coffee farmers and the sorting on tables by slightly older coffee farmers, mainly women, providing them with more income.