Phwoaaarrrr - this Rwanda is amazing. Every now and then we get a washed coffee out of this country that just destroys everything, this is is. I walked up to Harley on the roaster and he passed me cup - I though it was definitely one of these crazy weird expensive Colombias on first sip - such pronounced fruit notes - then he tells me it's the Dahwe and I nearly keeled over.
This is what we mean when we say coffee isn't Pokemon. There are lots like this out there with hundreds of contributing smallholders. Coffees that stand up on the table next anything some "football player name" rockstar producer can cook up in their personal labs. These need hype too, this coffee is a steal, enjoy!
Dhawe CWS
Dahwe Coffee Washing Station, acquired by Muraho Trading Company in 2025, is located in Gisagara District, Southern Province, about three hours south of Kigali. Sitting at 1,630 MASL, Dahwe serves over 1,400 farmers across Ndora, Muganza, Kibirizi, and Gishubi, who together manage more than 340,000 coffee trees. In its first year under Muraho, the station processed 285,000 kg of cherries as washed, natural, anaerobic natural, and cascara, while also distributing 85,000 coffee seedlings to local growers.
Beyond coffee, Dahwe is home to a model farm demonstrating integrated and regenerative agriculture. In 2025, 986 avocado trees and 4,000 pineapples were planted, alongside the growth of an Ankole cattle herd supported by 15,000 fodder reeds. The farm also produced over 74,000 coffee seedlings, installed hydrant irrigation, and mapped out future road networks to improve access.
Dahwe represents Muraho’s expansion into Rwanda’s Southern Province and reflects their vision of combining specialty coffee production with broader community development. More than a washing station, it is a hub where sustainable farming practices, food security, and coffee quality all come together.
The station purchases coffee from 1,400, growing cherries on approximately 340,000 trees; with the average farmer tending to around 240 trees. In 2025, Muraho Trading Co distributed 85,000 new seedlings to the producers they buy from.
Processing
All cherry is hand-sorted before a pre-pulp float, underripe or damaged cherry is removed, along with any foreign objects. Cherry is then floated in pre-pulping tanks removing any floaters and later pulped. Next, coffee is fermented in dedicated concrete fermentation tanks for an average of 12 hours. During this time, the fermented parchment is agitated several times through the day by way of ceremonial foot-stomping. After fermentation, coffee is released into a large serpentine grading channel. This process also separates parchment into different density grades.
During the washing process, parchment is continuously agitated to encourage lower density parchment to float and to clean any residual mucilage off the parchment. Once the parchment is separated into grades, it is given a final post-wash rinse. At this point, coffee is taken to a pre-drying area where the parchment is hand-sorted removing any insect-damaged, discoloured or chipped coffee. The parchment is laid out to dry and turned on a regular basis throughout the day for 30 days.
Gisagara
Dahwe washing station is located in Gisagara District in Rwanda’s Southern Province, an area characterised by smallholder coffee farming on fragmented plots, typically under one hectare. Coffee production here has historically been less centralised and less commercially developed than in Rwanda’s better-known western regions, with many washing stations operating below capacity or without consistent access to specialty markets. As a result, while the region has suitable altitude and Bourbon varieties capable of high-quality production, limited infrastructure, investment, and stable buyer relationships have often constrained quality consistency and farmer income prior to more recent private-sector involvement.
Rwanda
Rwanda is often presented as a kind of development success story - clean streets, steady growth, a government that appears to function in ways a lot of its neighbours don’t. That stability, largely shaped under strongman autocrat Paul Kagame, has been built through a highly centralised model that prioritises control and long-term planning over political openness. It’s effective, depending on how you measure it, but it also sits within a region that remains volatile. Across the porous border in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, armed groups like M23 continue to operate with Kagame’s support. Following the Rwandan genocide in 1994, many genocidaires fled Rwanda and contributed to ongoing instability in the DRC and Burundi. On the one hand Rwanda has shown the world what recovery can look like on a national scale, on the other hand its brutal history and hunger for justice have the potential to perpetuate instability in the wider region.
Coffee plays a specific role within that broader picture. Rwanda doesn’t have large estates or industrial-scale agriculture; instead, production is almost entirely in the hands of smallholders, each working tiny plots of land. That fragmentation could easily lead to inefficiency, but it’s been organised into a national system built around washing stations, pricing structures, and export channels. In practical terms, that means coffee becomes one of the few reliable ways for rural households to generate cash income - not enough on its own, but often critical for things like school fees, healthcare, and basic stability.
That’s where its potential for change sits. Coffee isn’t transforming Rwanda overnight, and it doesn’t resolve the deeper political or economic tensions, but it does create a consistent flow of value into rural areas where alternatives are limited. Companies like Baho Coffee operate within that system, and while they’re still part of a global supply chain with all its imbalances, the model - premiums, long-term purchasing, investment in infrastructure - can shift things incrementally in the right direction. It’s not a silver bullet, but in a country where small changes compound quickly, that kind of structure matters.
And it's got gorillas.
