Shop Coffee Of The Month

Discover the World of Coffee one Micro Lot at a Time
Join our Coffee of the Month subscription program and unlock special pricing and access to limited, small-batch micro lot coffees sourced from farmers across the globe.  You have the option to make a one time purchase or subscribe to each month. Monthly subscribers will receive a specialty-grade micro lot that are sourced from all over the world and carefully roasted to highlight the flavor profile of each coffee. Every month the listing will be updated here so you can get flavor notes and information about the coffee & farmer.  Let us be  your guide in experiencing the world of coffee and enjoy these amazing coffees with us. 

Coffee of the Month for September - Burundi

Grower - 400 producers organized around the Incuti producer group.

Altitude - 1900 MASL

Variety - Local Bourbon Cultivars

Soil - Volcanic Loam

Region - Kayanza Province, Burundi

Process - Fully washed and dried in the sun

Certification - Conventional

Roast Level - Medium/Light 

Flavor Profile - Roasted Medium/Light to preserve the clean, sweet cup.  Notes of rich dried fig, bright lemon and a smooth sweet caramel finish.

Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian, the founder of JNP Coffees, is without a doubt one of the most influential individuals in Burundi coffee today. Raised in Bujumbura, Jeanine would go on to earn an MBA from Northwestern University’s prestigious Kellogg School, cycle through corporate America, and eventually reconnect with her birth country by founding Burundi Friends International, a not-for-profit that funds educational and economic empowerment programs for rural Burundians, which is now in its 13th year. After a few years marketing Burundi coffees stateside for friends and family, Jeanine realized she had every reason to lead the business, and JNP Coffee was born.

JNP Coffee is highly focused on women’s empowerment, and along with a few local women’s rights advocates, formulated the Burundi chapter of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance. The network of IWCA farmer members in Burundi is now more than 2,000, whose coffee is differentiated by membership, marketed for its traceability and impact, and which generates end-of-year premiums for all involved. In fact, the IWCA value chain has been so impactful that JNP has created additional programs to expand their farmer base and generate premiums beyond the IWCA registered growers.

This is one of those additional programs. A local leader of a producer group in Kayanza Province, perhaps Burundi’s best known coffee terroir, decided to seek JNP’s partnership. He had heard of JNP’s assistance programs and post-harvest premiums and wanted to know how to involve his group. For groups like this JNP has established the “Dushime” program (dushime in Kirundi translates to “let’s be thankful”), which provides quality consulting, lot selection, marketing to JNP’s buyer community, and end-of-year premiums. This coffee, created from two distinct processing lots, has been titled Incuti, which translates to “relative”, and is often used to mean ‘’friend” in Kirundi. A fitting title for a new coffee relationship between Burundians. In Kayanza and Ngozi, the two provinces at the heart of the nation’s coffee production, competition for cherry can be fierce, so washing stations may pay well above the country’s minimum price to court premium harvests. JNP coffee goes a step further, returning second payments to farmers and investing in opportunities for education and community building.

Fully washed processing by the Incuti group is as detailed as anywhere in Burundi where the best coffees are produced. Cherry is floated for density and visible defects prior to depulping and fermentation. After fermentation is complete the wet parchment is sorted by density in concrete washing channels. Drying takes place at first under shade, and then in open air with the parchment piled into pyramids, which are flattened and re-shaped each day as a form of incremental air exposure to slowly and evenly dry the coffee and lock in the final moisture. The resulting profile is juicy and lime-like, a great expression of high-elevation Kayanza.

Discover the World of Coffee one Micro Lot at a Time
Join our Coffee of the Month subscription program and unlock special pricing and access to limited, small-batch micro lot coffees sourced from farmers across the globe.  You have the option to make a one time purchase or subscribe to each month. Monthly subscribers will receive a specialty-grade micro lot that are sourced from all over the world and carefully roasted to highlight the flavor profile of each coffee. Every month the listing will be updated here so you can get flavor notes and information about the coffee & farmer.  Let us be  your guide in experiencing the world of coffee and enjoy these amazing coffees with us. 

Coffee of the Month for September - Burundi

Grower - 400 producers organized around the Incuti producer group.

Altitude - 1900 MASL

Variety - Local Bourbon Cultivars

Soil - Volcanic Loam

Region - Kayanza Province, Burundi

Process - Fully washed and dried in the sun

Certification - Conventional

Roast Level - Medium/Light 

Flavor Profile - Roasted Medium/Light to preserve the clean, sweet cup.  Notes of rich dried fig, bright lemon and a smooth sweet caramel finish.

Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian, the founder of JNP Coffees, is without a doubt one of the most influential individuals in Burundi coffee today. Raised in Bujumbura, Jeanine would go on to earn an MBA from Northwestern University’s prestigious Kellogg School, cycle through corporate America, and eventually reconnect with her birth country by founding Burundi Friends International, a not-for-profit that funds educational and economic empowerment programs for rural Burundians, which is now in its 13th year. After a few years marketing Burundi coffees stateside for friends and family, Jeanine realized she had every reason to lead the business, and JNP Coffee was born.

JNP Coffee is highly focused on women’s empowerment, and along with a few local women’s rights advocates, formulated the Burundi chapter of the International Women’s Coffee Alliance. The network of IWCA farmer members in Burundi is now more than 2,000, whose coffee is differentiated by membership, marketed for its traceability and impact, and which generates end-of-year premiums for all involved. In fact, the IWCA value chain has been so impactful that JNP has created additional programs to expand their farmer base and generate premiums beyond the IWCA registered growers.

This is one of those additional programs. A local leader of a producer group in Kayanza Province, perhaps Burundi’s best known coffee terroir, decided to seek JNP’s partnership. He had heard of JNP’s assistance programs and post-harvest premiums and wanted to know how to involve his group. For groups like this JNP has established the “Dushime” program (dushime in Kirundi translates to “let’s be thankful”), which provides quality consulting, lot selection, marketing to JNP’s buyer community, and end-of-year premiums. This coffee, created from two distinct processing lots, has been titled Incuti, which translates to “relative”, and is often used to mean ‘’friend” in Kirundi. A fitting title for a new coffee relationship between Burundians. In Kayanza and Ngozi, the two provinces at the heart of the nation’s coffee production, competition for cherry can be fierce, so washing stations may pay well above the country’s minimum price to court premium harvests. JNP coffee goes a step further, returning second payments to farmers and investing in opportunities for education and community building.

Fully washed processing by the Incuti group is as detailed as anywhere in Burundi where the best coffees are produced. Cherry is floated for density and visible defects prior to depulping and fermentation. After fermentation is complete the wet parchment is sorted by density in concrete washing channels. Drying takes place at first under shade, and then in open air with the parchment piled into pyramids, which are flattened and re-shaped each day as a form of incremental air exposure to slowly and evenly dry the coffee and lock in the final moisture. The resulting profile is juicy and lime-like, a great expression of high-elevation Kayanza.