A premium, soft-bean coffee from the Dominican Republic.
This single-origin coffee is characterized by its smoothness. Grown exclusively by family farmers working in cooperation with the Earth Sangha, each bean is hand-picked, and sun-dried before being shipped to the Washington, DC, area and roasted by Beanetics in Annandale, Virginia.
The Earth Sangha is a nonprofit charity based in the DC area and devoted to ecological restoration.
SOLD OUT
About
Rising Forests® Coffee is “the most sustainable coffee” you can buy. We pay our coffee farmers directly — and we pay them at more than twice the usual Fair Trade rate. We also go beyond conventional shade-grown. Our coffee trees are planted with minimal disturbance in small groves, within tropical forest fragments, or into degraded areas that are being restored to native forest canopy. No pesticides or fertilizers are used to grow our coffee. By giving vulnerable forests an economic value, Rising Forests® creates a powerful incentive to conserve and restore forest.
All Earth Sangha profits from Rising Forests® return to our Tree Bank Hispaniola program, which works in the region where the coffee is grown: the mountains of the Dominican province of Dajabón, near the border with Haiti. The Tree Bank is a partnership between the Earth Sangha and the Asociación de Productores de Bosque Los Cerezos, a farmers’ co-op. The Tree Bank works to improve small-holder farm incomes through forest conservation projects that provide economic benefits. Learn more on the Earth Sangha's website.
We offer two roasts:
Medium is very smooth, with mild citrus and fruit notes. Perfect to drink all day long.
Dark is bolder, but not bitter, with chocolate flavors.
Both roasts are available as whole-bean or ground.
Where to Buy
We're currently sold out of Rising Forests Coffee. In 2015, a leaf-blight epidemic (the la roya) killed almost all the coffee trees in our region. Ever since, we have been replanting with blight-resistant varieties, but wont have a new harvest until late 2019 or 2020.
Behind the Scenes
Rising Forests® Coffee is roasted at Beanetics, a coffee shop in Annandale, Virginia.
Tree Bank Nursery Assistant Franklin Pérez Luciano stands beside the community center built by the Earth Sangha in 2011. In addition to providing a meeting space for the local farmers' co-op, this building is the region's only secure crop storage facility. Secure storage is essential for high-value crops like coffee.
The Tree Bank Nursery, the region's only community nursery, supplies free trees to member farmers. The nursery produces "orchard species," like the coffee shown here, as well as native species for forest restoration. Production during a good year amounts to around 25,000 seedlings.
The People of Los Cerezos, where Rising Forests® is grown, live in modest cabins like this. During the days, most of life is conducted outside, except during downpours. The pace is leisurely and people spend a lot of time socializing — an activity of great importance for regulating local life.
Local children peek through a fence to tease the Sangha's President, Chris Bright. Fences like this are constructed to keep cattle out of vegetable gardens and are common throughout the region.
As at the Sangha's DC-area Wild Plant Nursery, all the native trees at the Tree Bank Nursery are grown from locally-collected wild seed. Use of such local-ecotype seed means that the seedlings will be genetically representative of local, wild native-tree populations. These are seedlings of Hispaniolan royal palm, a very large and ecologically important tree in the region.
We have developed a crop system for farms with very poor soils. We rejuvenate one acre with manure amendments and a polyculture planting of about 20 crops, like this root crop, and we provide a cow. Less fertile land is then released for forest restoration.
The native west Indian mahogany is one of the trees that we are growing at the Tree Bank Nursery. This species is listed as endangered by the IUCN.
This colorful heap of just-harvested coffee "cherries" contains both ripe and unripe fruit — typical of the last pickings of the season. Only the ripe and highest grade beans will make their way into Rising Forests.®
Contact
Earth Sangha
5101 Backlick Rd Suite I
Annandale, VA 22003
Tel: 703 . 333. 3022