Barista Magazine is your home for the worldwide community of coffee and the people who make it.
Issue link: http://baristamagazine.epubxp.com/i/178542
RWA ND A THE VIEW FROM MY BED IS HAZY. Sleeping under mosquito netting not because the bugs are simply annoying, but because they very likely carry a life-threatening disease—well, that's different than what I'm used to. Having just visited my family home in Maine, I can attest to the annoyance of deep-woods mosquitos, but I still never sleep with netting. (Black fly season is a different matter.) Count this as one of the many new experiences I am to have this trip to Rwanda to serve as an international judge in the country's 2013 Cup of Excellence (COE). Having arrived in Kigali after some 40 hours of travel, I am obviously limited in my insight so far. I need some sleep. The first couple of days for the COE are ones of gathering. Folks from all over the world converge and have their own travel stories to tell. We've lost a few cuppers who were to join us due to visa and flight issues, so we are now 20 judges in total. Still, the pool is very international: We hail from Japan, Norway, Hong Kong, Austria, Netherlands, Brazil, Sweden, Taiwan, Australia, the United States, South Korea, and Poland. We're joined, of course, by in-country cuppers, as well. Those that arrive a day early like I did take the opportunity to check out the capital city of Kigali, for coffee at Bourbon, a local café that attracts mostly tourists; a bit of shopping and currency transaction (no credit cards in use here), then a quick lunch before our one-and-a-half-hour drive east to the Rwamagana district. We check into our entirely adequate rooms at the Hotel Devera (complete with aforementioned mosquito netting) and relax with a few local beers—Turbo King is my favorite—and a nice dinner. Opposite page: "Ladies in yellow": the Garukurebe dance and drum troupe performs at the welcome ceremony beside Lake Muhazi, Rwamagana. This page: The author pictured with children from the bilingual school in Rwamagana, where the COE judges presented students with new classroom desks. While I sadly forgot to bring any coffee-brewing devices, my fellow judges come well-equipped, and we play around with coffees from our home companies while relaxing and getting to know each other before our first day of cupping. The focus at COE is on evaluating the coffees just harvested. This means we come into country right after the coffee's been picked, and don't get as detailed a picture of the action as we would were we here midharvest. We do, however, get to reap the rewards of all the work that came before, and taste the delicious results of those efforts. Two hundred and twenty coffees were submitted to the COE in Rwanda this year. In order for a coffee to keep moving through selection, it must, by definition of a Cup of Excellence, score an 85 or higher on the 100-point scale. Of those 220 coffees, 100 qualify. By this point, the hardworking national cuppers had worked for weeks to test and retest these coffees in order to fully substantiate their respective scores. Of these, 59 are confirmed as 85 or higher on the COE score sheet. Coordination of this feat is no accident. The crew at the Alliance for Coffee Excellence (ACE), which produces and governs the COE competitions, along with the National Agricultural Export Development Board (NAEB), work tirelessly to ensure things run well and allow the international panel of judges—us—to focus on accurate scoring with the 59 coffees left standing. Established in 2011 under the Ministry of Agriculture, NAEB is www.baristamagazine.com 35