Zambia RFA AAA/AA Natural (2018 Crop)

This coffee is naturally processed on raised African beds. Cherries are selectively harvested before being double handpicked to ensure only the ripest, highest quality are processed. The selected cherries are dried on African beds for 18-24 days depending on ambient conditions. Shade nets used to diffuse sunlight and ensure an even drying process. Once the optimum moisture content has been reached the coffee is rested in a cool environment before being milled, graded by bean size and sorted to remove any remaining defects.

Zambia’s Northern Province is home to the country’s highlands, where ancient volcanic soils and natural processing help produce the complex flavor and heavy body of this AAA/AA graded RFA certified coffee. Although wet milling was introduced to the small holder coffee farmers of Mafinga thirty years ago, natural processing has been common throughout the region since the 1950’s, when commercial coffee production began in Zambia, home to the smoke that thunders. Long before Dr. Livingston arrived to name Victoria Falls after the queen, the people who had lived around this wonder of the natural world for generations had already named it more appropriately, “the smoke that thunders.” The falls thunder into the Zambesi River, which flows east toward Mozambique. But before the river crosses the border, take a left and head north up the Luangwa River. You’ll move through land rich in biodiversity, including the world’s largest concentration of hippos. As the river meanders and the altitude rises you will reach Mafinga plateau and Zambia’s largest coffee growing region which stretches all the way to the border with Tanzania.