FEBRUARY 2023 DISCOVERY COFFEE
TANZANIA - AAA/AA Umoja Natural
RED APPLE, HAZELNUT, BROWN SUGAR
OMNI ROAST (What’s an omni roast?)
REGION | Mbozi, Mbeya
PROCESS | Natural
SPECIES | Arabica
VARIETALS | Bourbon & Kent
ALTITUDE | 1650 MASL
ABOUT THE COFFEE
It isn’t Halloween, but this coffee tastes spookily close to a toffee apple! It’s also a wonderful example of how achieving higher prices for coffee at the farm gate can have a positive impact on the communities who work so hard to bring a great product to market.
The co-operative who produce this natural processed coffee were formed with one goal in mind: to improve the lives of the smallholder farmers in their region. They act as a catalyst for long term social change, focusing on creating sustainable impact for the coffee farming community - Goods for Good, they say.
This group of producers negotiated the highest price for coffee cherries in their region, at almost 80% over the standard local market rate, helping them to engage in a number of community projects including refurbishing the local school. They also invested in a broad scope health project, lobbying for improvements in areas such as staffing levels, clean water storage, computers, refrigeration, and sterilizing units.
ABOUT THE ORIGIN
This country was formed by the unification of two states - one an island, and the other a vast plain known in the local indigenous language as the ‘sail in the wilderness’. Its name is a clipped compound (amalgamation) of the names of both states. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited regions on earth.
HISTORY OF COFFEE IN TANZANIA
Taking the average number of bags exported annually 2007-2017—to account for crop fluctuations—Tanzania experienced an increase of 11 percent over the previous 10 years. That might not seem like much until you consider that only two other African countries have experienced growth by the same measure, Ethiopia (37%) and Uganda (1%). Tanzania broke the million bags exported ceiling for the first time in 2009 and did it again in 2013. This increase in exports has coincided with a near 600 percent increase in domestic coffee consumption over twenty years. The only coffee growing country to experience a more dramatic increase is Vietnam, where domestic coffee consumption has grown by 700 percent over the same period.
