coffee cupping
the kirasa roast story
Last month we took a trip to Nottingham to visit our friends at Outpost Coffee, as we looked to extend our range of conscious coffees.
The team at Outpost took us through a variety of exciting coffee flavours as we explored which beans we thought you guys would love the most. In this journal we want to explain a bit more about our latest bean, the kirasa roast, why we chose it and to share its amazing story.
To pick our new coffee we used a process known as ‘cupping’. This is how coffee is tasted by producers and buyers around the world to check the quality of a batch of coffee. For us, cupping is an accessible way to compare several coffees and test our taste buds.
a Burundian bean
We loved the sweeter fruit flavours of a particular Burundian bean we tried, the chocolatey base was familiar to the coffees we personally love. We ended up deciding we needed this bean in our collection - this roast really springs to life in your cup.
conscious coffee
It was more than the flavours that drew us to this one, the bean we chose is raised in the Muhuta lands of Burundi through The Akawa Project. This feel-good project invests in the infrastructure of local growing communities, including an innovative payment model designed to make coffee fairer for farmers.
A flat price is paid upfront to the mill prior to harvest, meaning that the farmers receive all of the money for their coffee upfront and they aren’t subject to exploitative negotiation, something which is not common at all in Burundi.
This conscious approach to coffee production grabbed our attention as it aligns closely with our mission as a brand to take a holistic view on the life cycle and impact of our products. As always we owe a huge thanks to the guys over at Outpost for their amazing work sourcing these life-changing initiatives.
“Sweet raspberry bursts across a chocolatey base.”
something different
While we were in Nottingham we worked to bring our idea for the vaabs tasting box to life. Open one of these boxes to find 100 grams of all three of our roasts, umlazi, sika and kirasa roast - bringing a variety of coffee from the world’s finest coffee regions to your own environment.
This is an ideal gift for anyone looking to curate their domestic cupboard provisions and continue their coffee exploration. The tasting box provides three distinct roasts which complement each other through chocolate, fruit and nut notes - presented with vaabs signature branding.
