Mushaka

Mushaka is a washed Arabica coffee from the Mushaka washing station in the Rusizi district of western Rwanda. The coffee is grown at high altitude (around 1,650–1,800 metres above sea level) by smallholder farmers and processed at the local station with careful pulping, fermentation and drying. In cup, Mushaka coffees can show flavour notes of caramel, citrus, raspberry, honey syrup, orange cinnamon and crisp apple depending on the roast and batch.

Mushaka comes from the Rusizi district in southwestern Rwanda, near Lake Kivu. This region is part of Rwanda’s “land of a thousand hills,” where coffee is grown on steep slopes with volcanic soils and a cool, stable climate that benefit Arabica cultivation. Farmers in Rusizi deliver ripe cherries to washing stations like Mushaka, where they are pulped and dried on raised beds to preserve clarity and brightness. Rwanda’s coffee sector is dominated by smallholder farmers who rely on communal washing stations for consistent quality.

Coffee was introduced to Rwanda in the early 1900s by German missionaries and later expanded under Belgian colonial rule. In the 1990s, the Rwandan genocide and a global coffee price collapse devastated the industry. Recovery efforts in the 2000s, supported by government strategy and international investment, focused on quality improvements through washing stations and farmer training. Today, Rwanda produces mainly high-altitude Arabica, with Bourbon as the dominant varietal, and coffee is one of the country’s leading export crops, supporting hundreds of thousands of smallholder farms.