Notes: Toffee, Orange, Peach
From the remote heights of Giku Hill in Burundi's Kayanza province comes a washed lot that carries the distance it has travelled in every note. This is one of the furthest-flung corners Long Miles Coffee reaches, a hill set fifteen kilometres down a dirt road from the company's original Bukeye washing station, across two rivers and two provincial borders, on the fringes of the Kibira Forest, the country's only indigenous rainforest. At 1,700 metres above sea level the Bourbon ripens slowly in thin mountain air, drawing out the clarity and structure for which the region is known. Coffee is the hill's most important crop, grown alongside corn and beans around small mud-brick homesteads in an area with limited access to clean water and no electricity.
Long Miles Coffee was founded in Burundi in 2011 by Ben and Kristy Carlson, an American couple who set out to secure fair and consistent prices for Burundian farmers and to keep every lot traceable back to the hill on which it grew. In 2025, 742 farming families delivered cherry from Giku, part of the wider community drawn to Ninga, a washing station Long Miles built in 2019 so that growers who had long travelled great distances could reach a closer site offering transparent, honest pricing.
At Ninga the coffee is guided through a careful process built to protect its clarity. Cherries are hand-picked at peak ripeness, then floated and hand-sorted a second time to remove anything under-ripe or damaged. They are de-pulped the same day they are picked, fermented dry for twelve hours, then left submerged in water for a further twenty four, before being rinsed in fresh water and graded by density. The coffee then moves to raised beds, where it dries slowly over sixteen to twenty days until it settles at 10.5% moisture.
