Kigina

Filter Coffee of the Month — Burundi Kigina

- Process: Natural

- Variety: Bourbon

- Altitude: 1,730 MASL

Taste: Strawberry, Red Apple, Tropical Fruit, Bergamot

About the Coffee

This lot didn't earn its own name by accident. Cupped separately from the rest of the Kigina Hill harvest, it stood out enough to be pulled aside and treated as its own microlot — a rare distinction in a region where most coffee moves through as bulk.

It comes off Kinama Washing Station, in Burundi's Ntahangwa Commune. The station itself is barely a few years old — it started in 2022 with nothing but drying tables, then added a wet mill, warehouse and office by 2023. Despite the young infrastructure, it now turns out around 60 tons of green coffee annually, all sourced from 92 smallholder farmers working Kigina Hill.

The station is run by Migoti Coffee Company, started in 2015 by two engineers, Dan and Pontien, with a simple premise: pay farmers for cup quality instead of raw volume, and build the processing infrastructure to make that possible.

Gaspard Nahimana is one of the growers behind this lot. He's 58, farms at 1730 masl, and manages 3800 Bourbon trees — around 250kg of cherry a season goes into this specific microlot. He started farming coffee in 2015 and has since used the income to send his kids to school, including one now at university. His next goal is scaling up to 5,000 trees. In Burundi, where cherry prices often haven't kept pace with the cost of living, that kind of growth is hard-won.

In the cup: a naturally processed Bourbon that leads with strawberry and tropical fruit, backed by a crisp red apple acidity and a bergamot finish that lingers clean and tea-like.

Barista Notes — Filter

This is a delicate, aromatic coffee — treat it gently and give it room to open up.

- Ratio: 1:16 (15g in, 240g out) — keeps the strawberry and tropical fruit forward without over-concentrating the cup

- Time: 3:00–3:30 — a slightly slower draw-down is needed to fully extract the sugars at this altitude, which is where the red apple acidity comes through

- Temp: 94–96°C — high enough to draw out the bergamot aromatics and finish clean rather than flat

Single Origin coffee orders can take up to 1.5 weeks to be delivered. We roast them weekly and they sell out fast.