Get ready for some taste sensations, you lot! We've got two new ethical single origins to try.
Ethiopia Sidama
First up is the Ethiopia Sidama, featuring delicate fruity, floral flavours. It's grown in the shade of Sidama region's native forest of Southern Ethiopia by a small group of farmers.
Buriso Amaje is the leader of both the local community and the Sidama farming collective, so the coffee is processed and dried out at his family home.
Since the main obstacle to small producers trying to market their coffee direct is down to cashflow, our supplier (and all-round awesome ethical coffee sourcing company) Falcon prefinanced the coffee. This was to make sure the farmers weren't forced to sell their coffee locally for cash.
Falcon's team continue to work alongside Buriso and the small coffee farming collective, sharing knowledge on farm management, picking, processing and drying.
D.R. Congo
Bad Hand's D.R. Congo single origin is our new Planet-Saving Coffee, meaning £2 from every bag sold will go direct to local charities.
It was grown in the Democratic Republic of Congo and its flavours are extra sweet, caramel-ly with a taste of chargrilled pineapple.
This super-juicy coffee comes from Coopade – one of the cooperative projects that is part of the Virunga National Park coffee programme. It aims to help more than 7,000 coffee farming families living on the border of the park to realise the potential of their coffees.
The Virunga National Park coffee project helps to teach things like sustainable farming, how to increase coffee quality through better processing and how to establish links with international importers and roasters.
In DRC, women do most of the work on coffee farms but are often left out of the process after harvesting. However, in July 2016, Coopade created a Women’s Section with the objective of allowing women coffee farmers to control the whole of the process from production through to export.
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