The mill was founded in March of 2016, just in time for the harvest to begin. In the first year of operations, Kilimbi - along with sister station Rugali - became the first mills in Rwanda to legally process Honey and Natural coffees. We're lucky to have some of those coffees featured on our menu this year, as well as clean washed coffees and a small amount of a processing experiment we attempted with MTCo.

When we visited the mill, the team of just over 100 staff were prepared with a ribbon cutting ceremony and a traditional song and dance, to welcome us as the first North American buyers to visit. While we toured the operations, we were invited to partake in 'ikinimba' which is a dance on the coffee cherries to help activate the sugars for fermentation. It was a rigorous task although the energies were high and the smiles were large. After, we helped sort the coffee parchment of another tank that had finished its 12 hour fermentation period and pushed these coffees through a serpentine channel. This is a channel that has a slight slope with clean water flowing from the top. As the water flows, you use gravity to separate the beans by density, with the highest density sitting toward the top of the channel by the time the process is finished.

Grown by Luz Mila at El Oasis farm, close to Gaitania, in the Tolilma department. This is the first time Forward has featured a coffee from Luz Mila, purchased through offer samples from our friends and partners at Cofinet. Luz Mila is originally from the Caquetá department of Colombia and recently her and her family (4 children and husband) relocated to Tolima. This is the second farm that Luz operates and only focuses on micro-lots.

This lot was carefully hand-picked and hand sorted. This lot was exposed to a dry anaerobic fermentation in plastic tanks for 24 hours, then placed inside GrainPro bags and fermented again for 30 hours inside a water tank that held a consistent temperature of 22C. Following these sophisticated fermentations, this coffee was dried for 16 days in raised beds.