Queen City Coffee - Hingakawa Washed Rwanda (10oz.)

About The Product:  Our OG producer partnership, we've been working with the homies of Abakundakawa Cooperative since day one of QC. This (10oz.) bag is a collaboration with them. They're the community hub for over 2200 members, all of whom are smallholder farmers, in Rwanda's northern volcanic region of Rushashi. The co-op is a leader in Rwanda's coffee industry with a progressive focus on water/energy savings, advanced pulp recycling methods, and a women's empowerment association within the co-op called Hingakawa.

Hingakawa is a group of 740 widowed women, both Hutu and Tutsi, who lost their husbands in the Rwandan genocide and subsequent conflicts. They cultivate coffee on a collective plot, in addition to providing cherries from their personal landholdings, as a form of social reconciliation and restoration.

About The Company: We believe that honest relationships, from farmers to consumers, achieve an equitable and sustainable coffee supply chain. In many ways, Queen City started in the mid-2000s while we worked, researched, and played in rural Africa. From Zimbabwe to Rwanda, we spent nearly a decade coordinating humanitarian programs, organizing research projects, and kicking around on humble soccer fields with friends. We learned about community in Africa — real, honest community.

Life eventually brought us back to our roots, back to Colorado and the great city of Denver. Along the way, we indulged our passion for coffee by moonlighting as baristas and roasters, and this made our next project an easy progression — we love our farmer friends + we love our city, the Queen City of the Plains + we love coffee — so we started a company that combines all these things!

Collective coffee means we’re doing this together — we have real, tangible connection with our coffee farmers; we know the conditions of their production; we then small-batch roast their coffee in the city we love and we proudly serve it in Denver’s historic Baker neighborhood. We believe everyone is welcome to this ragtag group because good coffee should build the collective good.