Burundi Giku Hill, Ninga, Washed Single Origin

Region: Giku Hill, Butanyerera Province, Burundi

Process: Fully Washed

Producer: Long Miles Coffee, 742 farming families

Varietal: Bourbon

Altitude: 1,700 masl

The coffee

This coffee has travelled a long way to reach your cup. It’s a washed lot from Giku Hill, one of the most remote coffee-growing areas we source from, processed at the Ninga washing station. The cup carries praline and sweet orange, with a peach note running through a clean, structured finish.

The farm/producers

Long Miles Coffee was founded in Burundi in 2011 by Ben and Kristy Carlson, an American couple who set out to help Burundian coffee farmers get fair, consistent prices for their cherry. The company now works with thousands of smallholder farming families across the country, building washing stations and keeping every lot traceable back to the hill it grew on. Giku Hill sits 15 kilometers down a dirt road from Long Miles’ original Bukeye washing station, across two rivers and two provincial borders, on the fringes of the Kibira Forest, Burundi’s only indigenous rainforest. Coffee is the hill’s most important crop, grown alongside corn and beans around small mud-brick homesteads. The area has limited access to clean water and no electricity. In 2025, 742 farming families delivered cherry from this hill, part of the wider community around Ninga, a washing station Long Miles built in 2019 so growers who’d been travelling long distances to sell their coffee could reach a closer site with fair, transparent pricing.

The process

Cherries are hand-picked at peak ripeness, then floated and hand-sorted again to remove anything under-ripe or damaged. They’re depulped the same day they’re picked, fermented dry for 12 hours, then left submerged in water for a further 24 hours. The coffee is then rinsed in fresh water and graded by density before moving to raised beds, where it dries slowly for 16 to 20 days until it reaches 10.5% moisture.

Why we like it

The extended, washed  process gives this coffee real clarity, pulling out its stone fruit and orange character without losing the structure.  It’s a coffee that reflects the resilience of Giku’s farmers as much as the quality of the washing station now working closely with them. With a brightness and depth African coffees are know for, this coffee is brewing beautifully for both espresso and filter.