Blind Assessment:

Crisply sweet, spice-toned. Baker’s chocolate, cinnamon, date, magnolia, pipe tobacco in aroma and cup. Briskly sweet, floral acidity; satiny-smooth mouthfeel. The gently drying finish is savory-leaning, leading with pipe tobacco notes with backgrounded hints of baker’s chocolate and hazelnut.

Notes:

Burundi is a small, landlocked country in the Great Lakes region of Central Africa. Most coffee is grown in the mountains of the north, bordering Rwanda. Benefiting from ideal growing conditions and large plantings of local strains of the heirloom Bourbon variety of Arabica, Burundi coffee has an excellent reputation, though it is better known in Europe than in the United States. This is a dry-processed or “natural” coffee, meaning the beans were dried inside the fruit rather than after the fruit has been removed, as is the case with wet-processed or “washed” coffees. Kakalove Café is a nano-roaster located in the small city of Chia-Yi in Taiwan that strives to procure and roast the finest quality coffee. Visit www.kakalovecafe.com.tw or email kahiyuho@gmail.com for more information.

The Bottom Line: An original Burundi coffee, unusual both for its processing method (dried-in-the-fruit or natural; most Burundi coffee is wet-processed or washed) and its striking floral-toned acidity.