Reconciled with Coffee

It started with a grandmother's farm
In our household, falling below 80 percent at school had consequences. Jules's father ran a serious household — excellence was not a suggestion; it was the minimum. Fall below it and the punishment was swift: you were sent to help your grandmother during the coffee harvest on her farm in the hills of Western Province.
Jules hated it. The farm was on a hill you had to climb up and down all day.
His older brothers Eric and Clement felt differently.
They saw something Jules had not yet learned to see. They saw potential.

2011 — 2,500 trees on a hillside
While Jules was trying his best to avoid attaining Cherie picking, Eric and Clement were spending their school holidays on their grandmother's farm — not as a punishment, but because they had seen something Jules had not yet learned to see.
In 2011, the brothers planted 2,500 coffee trees on the family land in Western Province. They had no external funding, no export connections, no industry contacts. They had a hillside, a harvest, and a belief that what grew in their grandmother's soil was worth something to the world.
For the next few years, they picked their own cherries and sold them to neighbouring buyers — the smallest unit of participation in a supply chain that stretched from their hillside to roasters in Europe and America they would never meet.

2014 — Mpanda Washing Station
The brothers did not stop at selling cherry. They began buying cherry from neighbouring farmers — extending their reach, improving their processing control, building the quality that would eventually earn them something beyond a commodity price.
In 2014, Eric and Clement established the Mpanda Washing Station. What started as a facility producing a single container of green coffee annually was the first proof that their hillside operation was becoming something real.

2016 — Nyarusange, and a partner who believed in them
In 2016, Rwanda Trading Company — an American trading partner — recognised what the brothers were building and provided pre-financing to expand. That capital enabled a second washing station on the hills of Nyarusange, in the green volcanic terrain of Western Province.
Two stations. Two communities. Two processing facilities turning the work of hundreds of smallholder farmers into export-quality green coffee.

2019 — Jules joins the family business
By 2019, he had watched his brothers grow from picking their first cherries on their grandmother's farm to running two washing stations supplying international buyers. The operation that had started with 2,500 trees now worked with 647 farmers at the Nyarusange station alone.
Jules joined Eric and Clement as their operational and marketing manager. He understood what they had built. He also understood what was missing — a direct connection between their coffee and the roasters who would value it most.

2022 — Melbourne, and a decision
When Jules moved to Melbourne in 2022, he brought something with him that no importer could replicate. Not just knowledge of Rwanda's coffee industry. Not just relationships with cooperatives and washing stations. But a family stake in the origin itself.
He watched Melbourne's specialty coffee scene — one of the most sophisticated in the world — pour cup after cup from Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, and Guatemala. He watched roasters search for origin stories, for provenance, for something they could tell their customers with genuine conviction.
Rwanda was almost invisible in Melbourne cafés. For someone whose brothers had planted 2,500 trees in Rwandan soil thirteen years earlier, that absence was not acceptable.

Today — The Brothers Coffee meets Melbourne
Today, Eric and Clement's two washing stations — Mpanda and Nyarusange — process up to ten containers of green coffee annually under The Brothers Coffee. The company they built from a grandmother's farm and a school holiday conviction is the origin story at the heart of what 1000 Hills brings to Melbourne.
1000 Hills Beans was founded to do one thing: create a verified, transparent, direct channel between Rwanda's finest cooperative and family producers and Melbourne's specialty roasters. The coffee Jules imports alongside The Brothers Coffee — from RWAMATAMU, Twongerekawa COKO, and others — comes with the same commitment his brothers made in 2011.