The characteristics of Rwandan coffee beans the defective flavor of Rwandan coffee with potato flavor

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In the Rwanda COE competition, 220 coffee samples from all over the country entered the pre-selection (pre-selection), of which 100 entered the domestic competition. In the week-long competition, 59 were selected for the international evaluation competition, and the judges selected more than 85 points of coffee blindly during the five-day competition period. The 20 coffee samples with the highest scores represent the best efforts of farmers in the country in the past year. The average price at an international auction is usually tens of times the price of the commodity market. However, once eliminated during the competition, the participating coffee can only be sold at local prices. Farmers put far more effort into growing participating coffee than commercial coffee; this is the cruelty of the competition.

There are many kinds of coffee defects, such as mixed with foreign objects (foreign body), which can occur all over the world. On the other hand, some will only ravage some areas like endemic diseases, such as Rio in Brazil. PD (potato flaw) mainly affects several Central African countries such as Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi and Kenya. The affected coffee has a strong flavor of raw potato, which is quite obvious. The industry does not know much about its causes. Current evidence suggests that Antestia insects bite through the peel of coffee and cause bacteria to invade and release a chemical into the core of the fruit. What annoys farmers most is that most of the defects can be found and can be removed in the process of harvesting, handling or bagging. But the appearance of raw beans with PD is as green as normal, and there is no difference until the moment of stir-frying. The smell of potato will only come out after grinding. The only chance is the subtle identification of colors on pods that have never been dried. Searching through thousands of pods to be dried is impossible in Africa, where coffee is screened manually.

That night, PD naturally became the theme of the round-table dinner between the international jury and officials from the Ministry of Agriculture of Rwanda.

Lost $20 million, but it didn't improve much.