The story
Coffee reached what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo with European colonists, according to the importer Cafe Imports, who ran large plantations worked by local labour. The green-coffee trader Sucafina says nobody knows the exact date it arrived, but that coffee became an important earner during Belgian rule, and that the east of the country was once described as "a paradise for coffee."
After independence from Belgium in 1960, Cafe Imports says, the plantations were broken up and the land shared out in very small plots. The national coffee authority, the Office National du Café (ONC), held a monopoly on exports until 1976, and prices were freed in the early 1980s. Moving from big estates to thousands of smallholder farms was hard on growers, who had to find their own way to market.
Political unrest in the decades that followed hit coffee hard. Sucafina cites a New York Times report that the country produced less than a tenth as much coffee in 2010 as in 1990, and notes that the eastern growing areas were among those most affected by the wars. Many farmers took their coffee across Lake Kivu by boat to sell in Rwanda, a dangerous trip. Sucafina describes the region as calmer today, though farmers still face informal taxes and bribes, and says investment has helped set up cooperatives and washing stations.
Most of the country's coffee is Robusta, a hardier species, and much of the rest is not specialty grade, according to Cafe Imports. Coffee is grown across much of the country, but the higher-quality Arabica that specialty buyers look for comes mainly from the east. Cafe Imports lists Ituri, North Kivu and South Kivu as the growing regions it buys from; Sucafina lists North Kivu, South Kivu and Oriental Province. North and South Kivu sit along the western shore of Lake Kivu, across the water from Rwanda.
Sucafina ranks the DRC 23rd in world production, at about 170,800 bags of 60 kg a year. Cafe Imports estimates about 11,000 people work in coffee, with an average farm of about 1.5 hectares.
Cooperatives are central to the specialty trade. Cafe Imports buys from SOPACDI, a group of nearly 6,000 smallholders founded in 2002 by the farmer Joachim Munganga. Coffee Review has pointed to SOPACDI's rise in the Kivu region as one of the notable changes in the Great Lakes coffee trade.
How it's processed
A coffee bean is the seed inside a small fruit called a cherry. After picking, the fruit has to come off and the seed has to dry, and how that is done shapes the flavour.
Cafe Imports lists washed as the processing method for its Congolese coffees. In the washed method, the skin and fruit are removed soon after picking, and the seed is dried without them. This is the traditional method across the African Great Lakes, according to Coffee Review, which found that most of the coffees it received from the region were washed.
Coffee Review also received a smaller share of natural coffees, dried inside the whole fruit, and a few honey coffees, where some fruit is left on the seed while it dries. That report covered the whole region, so it does not say how common these methods are in the DRC alone.
The region has one well-known quality problem, often called the potato defect: a raw-potato smell and taste in some cups. Coffee Review links it to bacteria that enter the beans through holes made by the antestia insect, and says it mostly affects Burundi and Rwanda. It also reports that efforts by farmers and mills to control it appear to be working in the specialty lots it tasted.
Harvest timing differs a little by source. Cafe Imports gives a main harvest from March to July and a smaller fly crop from September to January; Sucafina gives April to July.
What it tastes like
There is less published tasting detail for the DRC than for its neighbours. Coffee Review's report on the Great Lakes region describes the classic cup there as bright and balanced, with a smooth, full mouthfeel and crisp, often juicy acidity. A Congolese coffee from SOPACDI scored 94 in that tasting.
The same report found that natural and honey coffees from the region tended to show more obvious fruit notes than washed ones. Cafe Imports, which buys around Lake Kivu, says the lake and its surroundings have a wide range of microclimates, so coffees can differ a lot even within a small area.
Because the specialty supply is small and still growing, the tasting notes on each coffee are a better guide than any country-wide rule.