Ladies of Mbilima, Rwanda — February 2026

FEBRUARY SUBSCRIPTION

I am sorry to be getting the emails out late each month. It is something that I am working on. I always want the emails to give a true background and insight into this process that I love so much.

Ladies of Mbilima, Rwanda

One of our favourite coffees of the year is back! When we are so familiar with a coffee and trusting of its flavour profile, we start to feel adventurous and ready to explore. We have been buying coffee from Mbilima for 6 consecutive years, a lovely female collective that has an exceptionally strong working relationship with the importer, Melbourne Coffee Merchants.

In the past two months, we have dived deep into our curiosity. We started to rethink airflow in the roasting process and began thinking about how the environment in the roaster is impacted by the amount of airflow present in the roaster's drum during roasting.

This led to a few weeks of testing various different airflow settings across some key coffees. We tested a control baseline and then two different, more closed airflow settings. Each time a setting was changed, it substantially altered the way the roaster's temperature probes and gas settings behaved, meaning it took time to adjust other parameters to get the coffee into a window where airflow assessment could be made. Only when we had a good sample set could we move into the sensory assessment of the experiments.

Now, to tie this back to coffee and the flavour impacts of these changes: we have preferred the lower airflow settings, allowing the coffee bed and roasting drum to have a little more radiant and conductive heat transfer. We are using less gas as a result as well. This is more environmentally friendly and also shows that, at earlier stages, the coffee experiences a lower maximum environmental temperature; instead, it relies more on stored heat and latent energy transfer. We will continue to explore mild changes in airflow to see if there is more to be gained, but we are stoked with the newfound attributes we can achieve.

Our coffees across the board are cleaner, with better sweetness in the aftertaste. It would seem that our coffee has more internal development while maintaining a lighter roast degree, resulting in more intense, yet nuanced, complexity.

We hope the coffee has been thoroughly enjoyed. Each year it is a joy to work with and to share.

Take care, and please reach out if you have any further questions.

Ben