Outpost Coffee Roasters
Outpost coffee roasters are based in Nottingham, UK.
Starting their journey in 2013, these guys are all about high-quality coffee alongside some sharp design and educating their customers on the wonders of speciality coffee.
Outpost Coffee source the highest quality coffee from a select few importers. The coffee that they showcase is geared towards providing better pay and support for coffee growers throughout the world. This incentivises farmers to grow the best quality coffee through good farming and processing practices.
They roast their coffee in Nottingham on their state of the art coffee roaster. The roast profiles are tweaked for each origin and coffee varietal and they usually roast each coffee as a filter and espresso.
Outpost also offers coffee training, from brewing techniques to latte art, they have a home visit class which is great for groups or small businesses that want to learn more about speciality coffee.
Outpost Coffee’s extensive knowledge of speciality coffee and their focus on educating their wholesale clients and their customers really shines through in the coffee that they roast. They know how to get the vest of the green beans while at the same time know what their customers enjoy.
The Coffee
The Musasa coffee from Outpost Coffee roasters originates from Rwanda. The name Musasa is the washing station where the coffee is processed.
The Musasa Central washing station was founded in 2004 and was the first in the Northern Province of Rwanda.
It is located in the Ruli Sector, Gakenke District in Rwanda’s rugged North West and is one of the highest washing stations in Rwanda at 2000 metres above sea level, which usually is a good sign of high-quality speciality coffee.
The coffee comes from a number of small scale farmers who process their coffee at the Musasa CWS.
Most of the farmers cultivate less than a quarter of a hectare of land where they will grow roughly 250 - 300 coffee trees as well as other crops such as corn.
The cooperative gives these small farmers the chance to combine their harvests and process cherries centrally.
Before the rise of washing stations such as Ruli, the norm in Rwanda was for small farmers to sell semi-processed cherries on to a middleman, and the market was dominated by a single exporter.
This commodity-focused system - coupled with declining world prices in the 1990s - brought severe hardship to farmers, some of whom abandoned coffee entirely.
Today, it’s a different picture. Farmers who work with Musasa Dukunde Kawa have seen their income at least double, and the co-op produces some outstanding lots for the speciality market year after year.
‘Musasa’ means ‘a place to make a bed’ in Kinyarwanda.
Photo : Mercanta
The Review
The coffee starts as a classic natural, the unground coffee oozes sweet fruity notes of cherries and the wonderful fermented aroma that is typical of naturals.
First sips are fruit-forward, it has a fairly big in body and the fruity flavours wrestle for places on your palate, notes of cherries and prunes stick around in the aftertaste.
The coffee is a wonderful example of a well-processed natural and is super enjoyable to drink. It’s milk chocolatey body helps to balance the big bold stone fruit flavours that are obvious even before brewing the coffee.
As the coffee cools slightly the rich darker fruits take a back seat to more delicate fruity flavours of berries which reminded me of a classic jam doughnut.
Great coffee all round. Worked well as a pour-over and would recommend cupping next to a washed coffee so you can truly appreciate the boozy-fruity notes of a natural.
