The story
Coffee in Tanzania is older than the export trade. According to the green-coffee trader Sucafina, oral history says the Haya people of the north-west brought coffee back from Ethiopia in the 16th century. Their coffee, called amwani, was Robusta, and it was not brewed: the unripe cherries were boiled with herbs, smoked and then chewed. It was used in greetings, tributes to royals and religious rituals, and growing it needed royal permission. The importer Cafe Imports tells a similar story about the Haya and the chewed fruit.
That changed under colonial rule. When Germany took over East Africa in the late 1800s, it made farmers plant coffee as a cash crop, and Cafe Imports says the colonists pushed Arabica and built the industry around Mount Kilimanjaro. After the First World War the British took over and tried to model the trade on Kenya's. Smallholder cooperatives began forming in the 1920s.
For a long time Tanzanian coffee was a northern crop. Sucafina lists Kilimanjaro, Arusha, Tarime, Kagera, Kigoma and Karatu/Ngorongoro as the historic growing areas, and says the town of Moshi was once the single hub for milling and selling the country's coffee. Mills only reached the south in the 1970s and 1980s. Today the balance has flipped: Sucafina puts the south, mainly Ruvuma and Mbeya/Mbozi, at 75 to 85 percent of national output.
Most growers are small. Cafe Imports counts about 450,000 smallholders on farms of half a hectare to two hectares, and Sucafina says they grow more than 90 percent of the crop, with larger estates mostly in Arusha, Kilimanjaro and Mbeya. Sucafina ranks Tanzania around 15th among producers, at roughly 877,750 bags of 60 kg a year.
The importer Nordic Approach, which buys from cooperatives (called AMCOS) in Mbeya and Songwe in the south-west, says those highlands sit at around 1,400 to 2,000 metres. Varieties named by importers include Bourbon, Kent, Blue Mountain and a local type called Arusha, along with Tanzanian selections such as N39 and Compact.
How it's processed
A coffee bean is the seed of a small fruit called a cherry. Cafe Imports lists washed coffee as the usual method in Tanzania. In a washed coffee the skin and fruit are stripped off and the seeds are fermented and rinsed before drying. Nordic Approach describes the process at the southern stations it buys from: cherries are picked by hand, sorted by weight in water channels, pulped the same day, fermented and then dried on raised beds, sometimes finished on tarps.
Two other methods are growing. Sucafina notes that water is scarce in parts of southern Tanzania and that washing uses a lot of it, so it has worked with southern cooperatives on natural coffees, dried with the whole fruit still on. Nordic Approach also offers anaerobic naturals, where sorted cherries ferment in sealed barrels for about five days before drying.
How the coffee is sold matters too. Green coffee in Tanzania goes either through a national auction or straight to buyers, Sucafina says. The auction dates back to the British colonial period and took its modern shape in the 1980s. Reforms in 1994 let private traders buy and process cherries directly for the first time since independence.
Tanzania is also known abroad for peaberries. Normally a cherry holds two flat-faced seeds; a peaberry is a single round seed. Cafe Imports says much of Tanzania's crop goes to Japanese roasters who want uniform bean sizes, so the peaberries are often sorted out and sold to Western buyers instead. Whether they taste different is debated.
The harvest varies by region. Cafe Imports gives May to September in the south and July to November in the north; Sucafina gives May to November overall.
What it tastes like
Sources describe a range rather than a single house style. Cafe Imports says it looks for the complex acidity and juicy texture that good Tanzanian lots can have. Nordic Approach describes its southern washed coffees with notes such as stone fruit, dried fruit, black tea, red fruit, caramel and cocoa, and some lots with dark cherry, citrus, floral and hibiscus notes. Its anaerobic lots lean towards ripe yellow fruit with a mild boozy character.
Nordic Approach also notes that Tanzanian coffee has historically had processing defects, and that newer drying beds and equipment are helping produce cleaner cups. With that much variation, the tasting notes on each coffee are a better guide than any country-wide rule.