Burundi Giku Hill
Any orders placed after midnight on Sunday will be fulfilled the following week.
Region: Giku Hill, Kayanza Province, Burundi
Processing Site: Ninga Washing Station
Producers: ~150 producers
Elevation Grown: 1700 MASL
Variety: Bourbon
Process: Anaerobic Honey
Tastes like: Honey, Arizona Green Tea, and Loquats
A fifteen-kilometer stretch of dirt road and two rivers separate Giku hill from the nearest washing station. For years, families have carried their harvests by foot or bicycle, sometimes more than three hours each way, to deliver their cherries to Bukeye or the closest Long Miles collection point. That’s finally beginning to change.
This is the first year that Long Miles has produced a natural micro-lot from Giku. A new washing station, Ninga, is being built just down the road. It’s a quiet shift that could cut the journey from hours to minutes, and reshape how coffee moves through this part of Kayanza.
For now, farmers still bring their cherry to the Ninga site. After floatation and hand-sorting, the coffee is laid out on raised beds to dry in the skin for 25 to 30 days. It’s a slow process, color moving from deep red to prune-black, moisture steadily falling to 10.5%.
Salvator is one of the Coffee Scouts working on Giku. He’s part of a small team of young agronomists living in the hills themselves, guiding farmers in composting, pruning, organic pest control, and soil care. They’ve been pivotal in combating potato defect, and in restoring the land beneath these trees.
Their work doesn’t stop with harvest. Throughout the year, Scouts run farmer field schools and distribute shade tree seedlings as part of Long Miles’ Trees for Kibira project. They serve as liaisons, teachers, and friends, helping farmers learn the language of the soil and pass it on.
This is a fruit-forward, structured natural with quiet clarity in the cup. It’s also the start of something new from a region with deep roots in Burundi’s coffee story.