Crown Jewel coffees (you’ll see the little tiara on our label). These are specialty micro-lot green coffees curated by our longtime import partners at Royal Coffee in Oakland, CA.

From Royal Coffee:

Twenty-plus years of coffee sourcing history led to this coffee. When I was just getting started in coffee buying, one of the first and primary contacts in Rwanda was a woman named Laetitia Mukandahiro. My first trip to Kigali in 2013 involved a cupping of nearly 100 samples in one sitting, hosted by Uzziel Habimana. Together, their history in Rwandan coffee spans decades, spurred by early training programs for cuppers beginning around 2004. I doubt there’s anyone’s cup notes and scores I trust more in the world.

In 2019, after years in practice for recognizable brands such as Starbucks, Dukunde Kawa, and Rwashoscco, Uzziel and Laetitia joined forces to found Ikawa House, an independent training facility, export office, and quality control powerhouse. Among their clients are regular Royal Coffee supply partners, Kivu Belt coffee.

On visiting their lab in Kigali in 2023, I was impressed at the depth of their connections to coffees from all over the country, and when, in late 2025, we foresaw a need for an additional supply partner in Rwanda, it was a no-brainer to ask for Laetitia and Uzziel’s sourcing and qc expertise.

The result was a mixed container of coffees from across the small nation, representing some of the finest coffees we’ve seen all season. From these lots, we selected two to become Crown Jewels.

This natural coffee, the first such Rwandan selection for Crown Jewels, hails from the Nyaruguru district of Southern Rwanda, near the border of Kayanza, Burundi. The name of the coffee collection site and washing station is Busanze, and it is a unique partnership between a private enterprise and a local cooperative, sharing responsibilities and ownership over the facility. Much like other such locations in Rwanda, the station is reliant almost exclusively on local smallholders contributing their coffee cherry. The cooperative, called KUN, is just 81-members deep of whom 51 are women, and has the distinction of a top-ten placement in 2018’s Cup of Excellence competition.

This is a classic, minimal intervention natural. Coffee cherries are floated on delivery to remove imperfections, underripe and overripe cherries, and defects, and then simply dried in the sun (with ample workforce to tend to both sorting and turning the coffee to ensure even drying).

The result is a deliciously bright and sweet coffee, showcasing the juicy acidity of Rwanda’s extraordinary elevations and classic Bourbon-related trees, and the sweet undertones from perfectly ripe coffees selected and hand-sorted again and again and again by some of the world’s most dedicated coffee farmers and producers, with its quality vetted not just by the Crown Jewel team, but by the inimitable experts at Ikawa House.