personal coffee passport
Your coffee: Marangu Peaberry
FARM: Marangu cooperative, 35 farmers
LOCATION: Close to Nkoaranga, northern Tanzania
CULTIVARS: Arabica Bourbon (Jackson, Mbirizi) and Kent
FARM SIZE: 24 hectares
ALTITUDE: 1,400 - 1,800 meters above sea level
EXPORTER: Wanza
IMPORTER: This Side Up Coffees
ROASTER: Special Roast
About Marangu
When Rebecca - our trusted partner - returned to her mother’s land in 2011 and started interviewing farmers in the Kilimanjaro area, she sought to listen to and understand their real needs, struggles, and challenges. In this area, her family had been growing coffee for generations. She understood most farmers struggled to stay afloat after the global coffee price plummeted in the 90s, and Rebecca was seeking ways to help farmers earn more through their coffee. She especially wanted to create long-term benefits for coffee growers by creating a solid network of small, democratic, and independent cooperatives, organisations, and individuals committed to growing the best coffee in the best possible way. Rebeca and her team at Wanza quickly noticed that the community was eager to make a change, so the conversations gradually transformed into a community-led initiative to improve coffee quality and quantity and find buyers willing to pay better prices. For us, it’s a true honour to be part of this initiative, working with the Wanza team and Marangu farmers to create small, solid, and fully democratic organisations in the area!
Marangu - coffee specs
what to taste for
Aroma: berries, black tea
Body: pleasant dryness as found in a concord grap
Acidity: malic, red apple like
Aftertaste: raspberry, stone fruits
PROCESSING your coffee
Cherries are depulped using simple hand-pulpers and strictly washed the same day they are picked. They are then double wet-fermented (2x 18 hours), shade dried, and then sun dried on raised beds. The coffee is a peaberry, which means that unlike the normal two coffee beans in a cherry, it’s only one. It’s a round bean, and has therefore specific taste characteristics.
ROASTING YOUR COFFEE
Special Roast uses a 22kg Probat UG22 roaster, that has been built in 1965. The roast time is 10 minutes. After the first crack, the coffee is roasted for a remainder of 25% of the time.
Relative PRICE BREAKDOWN
53%
the price Wanza pays for their dried parchment, or the farmgate price.
14%
this includes all dry milling costs (paid to City Coffee Ltd in Moshi), preparation of the coffee for export and documentation.
13%
local transport costs to Dar es Salaam + overseas transport to Rotterdam, Netherlands.
15%
This Side Up compensation for spending time and resources bringing this relationship and coffee to life. Our work includes building relationships with origin partners in the field, finding markets for the coffees, linking farmers to rural banks and NGO partners, arranging the export and import channels, Q grading, sampling.
5%
Average financing cost we have to pay lenders - simply because we don’t have the money in the bank to buy such large amounts of coffee all at once. This ensures immediate payment to the farmers when the coffee leaves the farm or port.
Background of this coffee in the Netherlands
When Rebecca Trupin returned to her mother’s land in the Kilimanjaro region she wondered:,“What can I do for the region, and how can I do it while focusing on what’s best for groups rather than for individuals?” Slowly, yet steadily, she began working with farmers who not only had a real commitment to producing great quality coffee, but also sought democracy within their own organisations.
From our first import from Aranga in 2015 to today, Rebecca has had to go through many transformations. She learned how to manage complex farmer relationships, how to be the link between farmers and us from a distance, how to deal with complex Tanzanian bureaucracy, how to manage payment expectations and much much more. One of the main deceptions we faced every year was that we could not trust the large millers and we repeatedly received different quality coffees than the preshipment sample. After years of shopping around, Rebecca finally made the step to partner with Frank Mlay of the Tanzania Coffee Board and found her own export company: Wanza. This important step has allowed them to add more inspiring local farmer groups to their portfolio and help them achieve similar quality standards and prices as Aranga.
In Rebecca’s mother’s language, Swahili, “Wanza” means “to spark, to start life itself.” To us, this is exactly what Rebecca and her team have been doing since the very start of their work in Tanzania. In a region often forgotten by specialty coffee traders, we cannot overstate the importance of this work.