Tanzania Peaberry – Green Unroasted – PRICE DROP

Taste: A value priced African bean, Tanzania Peaberry is a customer favorite for its toffee flavor highlighted by floral notes.  Popular among home roasters for its berry shaped bean which rolls well in a pan when home-roasting on the stove-top.

Roast:  Medium/Dark (Full City Roast).  Stop the roast just as 2nd crack begins.

About: This lot is a blend of peaberries comprised of the deliveries of smallholder farmers located in the area around Mbeya, Tanzania. Each farmer owns an average of 0.4 hectares of land, and deliver their ripened cherry to a central processing unit run by an AMCOS, an agricultural marketing cooperative society. This lot contains coffee from four AMCOS: Bahanko, Mshewe, Muungano, and Utengule. The coffee is delivered in cherry form and depulped upon sorting. Then they are given a fermentation for a maximum of 72 hours, weather-depending, before being washed and dried on raised beds for 10–14 days.

With its relatively close proximity to Ethiopia, and its shared border with Kenya, some of Tanzania’s population has had a long history and culture relationship with coffee, namely the Haya people, for whom the plant was not used so much as a beverage as a chewed fruit. Coffee (probably Robusta) was grown for this domestic purpose until German colonists essentially mandated that farmers grow Arabica coffee as a cash crop, spreading the plants’ reach within the country and developing the industry around Mount Kilimanjaro.

Germany lost control of the colony to the British after the First World War, and the British attempted to develop a more efficient and profitable coffee industry along the lines of Kenya’s. Cooperatives of smallholder farmers started to organize in the 1920s to try to improve market access, but it was many years before Tanzanian coffees really caught on internationally.

In 1964, after both countries achieved independence from Britain, Tanganyika and Zanzibar were combined to establish the Republic of Tanzania—hence the country’s name, Tan/Zania. Growers attempted aggressive growth in the 1970s but had difficulty increasing production. The 1990s saw efforts to reform and privatize coffee exports, allowing growers to sell more directly. Today, in most of the Western world, Tanzanian coffees are famous primarily as separated-out peaberry lots.

*The term peaberry refers to a single oval bean that sometimes appears inside the coffee cherry in place of the usual two flat-sided beans. The smaller, denser peaberries are thought to have a higher potency of flavor, and “peaberry plus” is a higher grade than the more standard peaberry lot.

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