Tanzania AA Mbilidino

Mbilidino AMCOS was founded in 2018 with the establishment of a washing station equipped with a motorized hand pulper, and has now grown to serve 378 producers. Many smallholder farmers in Tanzania work collectively as Agricultural Marketing Cooperative Societies (AMCOS), which centralize cherry delivery to dedicated processing stations. The name “MBILIDINO” is derived from the villages where these passionate farmers reside: Idiwili, Mbulamsege, Ilindi, and Nonde.

The cherries sourced from these smallholders are grown in clay loam, with plantings consisting mainly of Bourbon derivates (90% N 39, 10% KP 423). The farmers deliver ripe cherries between 2 and 6 p.m. The motorized pulper is fired up around 3 p.m. and can run until 1 a.m during peak harvest times. Once pulped, the parchment undergoes meticulous grading, via washing channels. Parchment ferments for 24-48 hours, and is again washed and soaked before being sun-dried on tables for 8-14 days.

Microlots from Tanzania are traceable to the washing station level and are selected based on their cup quality. Due to the small average farm size, many producers (especially in the South) are members of AMCOS, Agricultural Marketing Cooperative Societies, which share centralized cherry delivery and processing stations. The coffees at these receiving points are blended together and sorted before being separated by quality, and microlot selections represent the highest-scoring lots differentiated from the larger day lots.

History of Coffee in Tanzania

With its relatively close proximity to Ethiopia, and its shared border with Kenya, some of Tanzania’s population has had a long history and cultural relationship with coffee, namely the Haya people, for whom the plant was not used so much as a beverage as a chewed fruit. Coffee (probably Robusta) was grown for this domestic purpose until German colonists essentially mandated that farmers grow Arabica coffee as a cash crop, spreading the plants’ reach within the country and developing the industry around Mount Kilimanjaro.

Germany lost control of the colony to the British after the First World War, and the British attempted to develop a more efficient and profitable coffee industry along the lines of Kenya’s. Cooperatives of smallholder farmers started to organize in the 1920s to try to improve market access, but it was many years before Tanzanian coffees really caught on internationally.

In 1964, after both countries achieved independence from Britain, Tanganyika and Zanzibar were combined to establish the Republic of Tanzania—hence the country’s name, Tan/Zania. Growers attempted aggressive growth in the 1970s but had difficulty increasing production. The 1990s saw efforts to reform and privatize coffee exports, allowing growers to sell more directly. Today, in most of the Western world, Tanzanian coffees are famous primarily as separated-out peaberry lots, though this has been changing in recent years.

Peaberries are a naturally occurring mutation of the coffee seed that forms a single, small, rounder unit than the two “flat beans” that typically sit face-to-face inside a coffee cherry. While somewhere between 5–12 percent of any yield can be expected to naturally develop peaberries, some coffee varieties and origins tend to see higher occurrence of them, while in others they are uniformly sorted out of each lot in order to maintain screen-size uniformity.

In the case of Tanzania, the majority of the coffee exported is bought by Japanese roasters, who prize bean-size uniformity and see peaberries as being an undesirable defect. For this reason, the peaberries are often unsold to the Japanese market, and for a long time was the majority of what was available to Western buyers. Some swear by peaberries having a degree of flavor potency that normal flat beans lack, and others can’t tell the difference. They do tend to be slightly pricier on account of both their more limited quantity (since peaberries occur in a smaller percentage of coffee overall) and the labor involved in sorting them out. 

Today, 95% of the coffee farmers in Tanzania are smallholders, growing coffee on less than 5 acres of land.

Growing Coffee in Tanzania

Exports from nearly every coffee growing country in Africa are lower now than they were twenty years ago. The most notable exception is Ethiopia, where coffee exports have reached 3 million bags, nearly double the number in 1997. Less dramatic, but nevertheless unique for Africa, is the strong and steady growth in Tanzania. Taking the average number of bags exported annually 2007-2017—to account for crop fluctuations—Tanzania experienced an increase of 11 percent over the previous 10 years. That might not seem like much until you consider that only two other African countries have experienced growth by the same measure, Ethiopia (37%) and Uganda (1%). Tanzania broke the million bags exported ceiling for the first time in 2009 and did it again in 2013. This increase in exports has coincided with a near 600 percent increase in domestic coffee consumption over twenty years. The only coffee growing country to experience a more dramatic increase is Vietnam, where domestic coffee consumption has grown by 700 percent over the same period.