The Long Miles Coffee Project

The Long Miles Project, founded by Ben and Kristy Carlson, began work in 2013, aiming to raise the bar of specialty coffees coming out of Burundi. The project works with more than 5,000 individual coffee farmers living near three central washing stations, Bukeye, opened in 2013, Heza, from 2014 and Ninga, which had its first harvest in 2020. There are several reasons why producing speciality coffee in Burundi is an incredibly difficult task. There’s the incredibly unstable political situation, where government can change rules on coffee prices and value chain seemingly overnight, the practical challenge of being a small landlocked country attempting to export coffee by sea freight, the constant threat of unrest. But through it all the Carlson family have managed to establish themselves as producers and exporters of consistently delicious coffees, all the while providing some semblance of stability to the lives of smallholder farmers that surround their washing stations in the northern Kayanza Province, near the border with Rwanda.

This washed lot is composed of coffee from across the entire Long Miles Project. Once coffees are processed, they are taken to the dry mill to be cleaned, sorted and prepared for export. Meticulous cupping and physical quality control of every lot throughout the process leads to several levels of quality. Each ‘micro’ lot from a single hill is kept separate, but those that don’t meet quality standards have to be re-sorted in order to meet minimum standards. In order to meet minimum lot sizes, sometimes these lots have to be mixed together, losing traceability in the process. This lot is one example, a washed lot combined from the output of all the Long Miles stations.

This lot is still produced using the same exacting fermentation, washing, drying and sorting protocols, but doesn’t offer the same taste of a specific hill or snapshot in time. As such, Umutumba is a great example of the archetypal washed Burundi profile, with delicate black tea balanced by dried fruit sweetness in the cup, reminiscent of raisin and apricot.