More than connecting buyers to producers, the Cup of Excellence plays a tremendous role in developing the sector in the country they go. Before this competition was organized in El Salvador or Brazil, those countries were barely known in the specialty coffee sector. They were known as origins doing consistent coffees, but far from the specialty industry. However, the Cup of Excellence helped them to gain recognition and helped producers & cooperatives to work differently as they have been linked to international actors at the same time. In Burundi, it will happen in the same way, now many regions are very renowned thanks to their positioning in the competition… However and what now seems more important, the Cup of Excellence should be a warning alarm for local entities in Burundi and Rwanda, concerning the potato defect* that some of their even finest coffees face. There is a lot to do concerning this issue, research and certainly look forward to any measure possible to decrease at its lowest the risk coffees face having this problem.

Does this adventure end here for us? Certainly not, as before we told you, we will be organizing cupping sessions of winning coffees for French roasters (or any European roaster who will like to join us) willing to participate on the auctions for buying some lots.

Here is the list of coffees winning Burundi’s 2013 Cup of Excellence:

Lot #	Farm	Farmer	Region	Score
1	KINYOVU	SOGESTAL KAYANZA	MATONGO, KAYANZA	90.37
2	NEMBA	WEBCOR	KAYANZA, KAYANZA	90.20
3	KIBINGO	WEBCOR	KAYANZA, KAYANZA	90.13
4	MPEMBA	KAZOZA NIKAWA	MATONGO, KAYANZA	89.73
5	MUREHE	SOGESTAL KIRUNDO	MARANGARA, NGOZI	89.00
6	GATARE	SOGESTAL KAYANZA	RANGO, KAYANZA	88.50
7	BURENGO	SOGESTAL KIRUNDO	NTEGA, KIRUNDO	88.27
8	MAHONDA	SOGESTAL KIRIMIRO	BURAZA, GITEGA	87.70
9	BUTEMBA	SOGESTAL KIRIMIRO	BURAZA, GITEGA	87.03
10	MURWI	MURWI	MURWI, CIBITOKE	86.60
11	KIRYAMA	SOGESTAL KAYANZA	BUTAGANZWA, KAYANZA	86.43
12	GISHAMBUSHA	SOGESTAL KIRUNDO	GASHOHO, MUYINGA	86.10
13	RUHANDE	SOGESTAL KIRIMIRO	GISHUBI, GITEGA	86.00
14	BUTEMBA II	SOGESTAL KIRIMIRO	BURAZA, GITEGA	85.87

And last but not least, we present you a short video we did of our trip in Burundi… the song on the background is “Tangerine” from Led Zeppelin, we let you guess why we did choose it ;)

If you have problems watching this video, view the web version here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAPrd3NOyeo&w=420&h=315


Until the next one,

The Belco Team

*The potato defect, is a problem coffees face due to the contamination of a single or many grains which keep the coffee and aroma of, literally, potato.