IN THE CUP
If you don't know, I'll tell you now: every coffee, if it's good, is good to make both espresso and filter, with any method, as long as it is made well. So try it as you like, but before trying it, if you haven't had it yet in your life, look for a very good dark chocolate, the best you can find, and eat it with two grains of salt, even less. Then make yourself this coffee, with those feelings in mind. It will be the dominant note of this wonderful and very deep coffee, which will be flanked, and you will not fail to notice it, the notes of a thousand red fruits that will slowly overlap one another as the coffee becomes hot in the cup before lukewarm and then maybe even cold, changing but always dancing around that salty chocolate that constitutes its backbone.

THE PRODUCER
Democratic Republic of Congo, on the southern shores of Lake Kivu, at an altitude of 2000 meters.

Here more than five thousand six hundred farmers are united in a cooperative with SOPACDI, which stands for  Solidarité Paysanne pour la Promotion des Actions Café et Development Intégral . Each farmer owns less than two hectares of plantations on average, and all of them give their precious coffee cherries to the ten processing centers in which SOPACDI's activity is divided.

THE PROCESSING
Coffee cherries are of various cultivars, all precious, starting with the Blue Mountain that became famous in Jamaica, but which - like all cultivars, or almost - was born here, in the heart of Africa. This  Kalungu-Birambo is delivered by the peasants to the Kalehe washing station on the shores of the lake.

It is a fully washed coffee  , washed: mechanically removed the pulp of the cherries (it is called  cascara ) on the same day in which they are collected and delivered, the bone is fermented dry for 12 hours. In the following 12 hours the fermentation continues in the water in which the coffee beans are immersed, to be then started like a green river through the washing channels, where they remain to soak for another 12 hours. At this point the coffee, purified of any residual pulp and mucilage, is left to dry on suspended mesh beds for 14-20 days.

ROASTING
Smoking Tiger coffees are never very dark: we like decisive but short, delicate roasts, which do not mask anything, not even any defects in a coffee, but which on the other hand are able to enhance the specific characteristics of each territory to the maximum. , of each cultivar, of each processing method, in a word: to enhance the differences to the maximum. Having said that with this coffee we have perhaps gone a little further than we usually do: the fact is that we had felt, in this coffee from the  heart of darkness , a pungent note almost salty and of very intense dark chocolate, and we wanted to follow this track, to exalt it to the maximum.

Kivu Kalungu - Birambo

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Down with coffee, long live coffees!
After all, this is our idea of coffee: diversity deserves celebration.

We try to put it in practise through few but challenging choices:
1. A very rigorous and demanding selection of the coffee beans that we import from all over the world
2. A dedicated roasting profile, a specific recipe for each coffee, that aims at enhancing the differences between the many varieties.
3. A confident but generally short roasting methodology, never reaching high degrees of toasting that could mask the peculiarities of the raw material. 

Kivu Kalungu - Birambo

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Kivu Kalungu - Birambo

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