Gahahe

About the Coffee

Gahahe Washing Station sits in Kayanza Province, Burundi, at 1,650 to 1,900 meters above sea level. It was established in 1989 and today receives coffee cherry from 1,740 farmers. The average farmer here owns less than half a hectare and tends around 240 trees on roughly a tenth of a hectare of land. Because plots are this small, most farmers also grow bananas, beans, yams, taro, and cassava alongside coffee, both to sell and to feed their families.

In Burundi, washing stations like Gahahe are the backbone of how coffee gets processed. Most farmers simply don't have the land or resources to do their own wet-milling (removing the fruit from the bean) or dry-milling (removing the dried outer layer before export). Instead, they deliver freshly picked cherry to centralized stations that handle sorting, fermenting, and washing. In Burundi, these facilities are called SOGESTALs (Sociétés de Gestion des Stations de Dépulpage Lavage). Because it takes deliveries from many small farmers to build a single lot, coffees here are sold under the washing station's name rather than by individual farm or producer.

Gahahe follows a processing method that shares some similarities with Kenyan washed coffees. After the cherry is depulped, the beans go through a dry fermentation of about 12 hours, then soak in mountain water for 12 to 14 hours. The beans are floated to sort by density, then soaked again for 12 to 18 hours before being laid out on raised drying beds in parchment. The quality of sorting and timing at each stage makes a real difference in the consistency of the final cup, and careful station management is what separates good Burundi lots from great ones.

About Eclipse

Eclipse Coffee Roasters was founded in 2014 in Canmore, Alberta. Their stated goal from the start was to source and roast quality coffee while keeping things honest and approachable for the people buying it. They roast to order, so the coffee ships fresh rather than sitting in a warehouse.

On the sourcing side, Eclipse runs each coffee through an independent screening process to check that it was grown in both an environmentally and socially responsible way. They share those findings publicly alongside each coffee and pay above market price to the farms they work with.