How is Africafe Coffee from Tanzania? Is it Delicious? What's the Price of Africafe Coffee?

Professional Coffee Knowledge Exchange

From the volcanic slopes that feed Tanzania's best-known brands to the roadside bars where locals linger over a cup, Tanzanian coffee offers a rich culture worth exploring. This piece looks at the country's famous labels, its everyday drinking habits, and where to find a good cup.

Tanzania's Famous Coffee Brands

Tanzania's best-known coffee brands include Africafe, Tanica Cafe, and Kilimanjaro. Tanzanian coffee has long been deeply loved in Europe, where it ranks among the premium brands. Europeans have even given it the nickname "coffee gentleman."

Africafe, one of the top representatives of Tanzanian AA coffee beans, is nourished by volcanic ash — a coffee shaped by nature itself. It carries a unique cocoa fruit aroma with a strong, mellow richness.

Coffee Culture in Tanzania

Tanzanians often visit roadside open-air bars, order a bottle of beer or a cola, and sit for half a day. They also love drinking coffee. Tanzania produces coffee, and Africafe's instant coffee is quite good — I buy it often. When heading home, it also makes a nice little gift.

People in rural areas, however, cannot afford this kind of instant coffee; they generally drink local coffee in small towns. I have seen how it is made in Dakawa: coffee beans are pounded into a fine powder in a mortar with a wooden stick, then sifted. The powder goes into a kettle with water and is brewed into a dark coffee. I have drunk it several times — the coffee flavor is still strong, but there is a burnt taste and plenty of grounds in the cup.

Africafe Coffee Shop

Africafe is a well-known local coffee shop, ranked fifth in Arusha on TripAdvisor — or rather, it is a shop that leans Western, which suits the crowd contributing the ratings. Personally, I think it is a hamburger and sandwich shop that also sells coffee: tasty, but not especially local in character. For travelers far from home, it is a relatively safe choice. Here is their fan page.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Choosing coffee as a gift comes down to two worries: not knowing how to match a coffee to the recipient, and not knowing whether they will like the taste. Coffee is unlike other gifts in that it comes in many forms for many occasions, so it is best to choose based on the equipment the recipient already owns. If the person loves to geek out over pour-over, they are chasing flavor layering and complexity, and a high-grade, high-quality bean is the right pick — FrontStreet's Emerald Red Label Geisha. Geisha has become hugely popular for its complex, changing florals and fruit-like sweet-tartness. FrontStreet's Red Label Geisha comes from Panama's famous Emerald Estate, which has insisted on rigorous management and production at high altitude for years; the result is Geisha's consistent, fragrant floral and fruit character, with compound fruit, citrus, honey, and rose tea in the cup. It is an excellent gift for an enthusiast or someone close to you.

If the recipient uses a French press, FrontStreet's Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1 is a safe and impressive choice. In fame, flavor, and grade, it sits at the top of the industry, so it is always an appropriate gift. Authentic FrontStreet Jamaica Blue Mountain No. 1 comes with Blue Mountain certification, the wooden barrels that the green beans are packed in, and a quality certificate issued by the Jamaica Coffee Board, so buyers can be sure it is genuine. On taste, authentic FrontStreet Blue Mountain balances sweetness, acidity, bitterness, and aroma with no single note dominating, and its body and sweetness are just right. It carries rich nut aromas, and brewed in a French press it shows roasted hazelnut, chocolate, cream, caramel, and cookie-like roast flavors, with balanced acidity, bitterness, and sweetness and a lasting finish.

For someone who travels often or is busy in the office, FrontStreet's Five-Origin Drip Bag assortment is the most fitting gift. Like pour-over, a drip bag's flavor depends on the beans, and different origins and processing methods give different characters. This assortment selects five of the most representative specialty regions, letting the recipient taste them all at once: the herbal spice of FrontStreet's Indonesian Mandheling, the berries and oolong-tea note of FrontStreet's Panama Butterfly, the citrus, lemon, and florals of FrontStreet's Ethiopian Yirgacheffe, the nut and chocolate aftertaste of FrontStreet's Honduras, and the smoked-plum juiciness of FrontStreet's Kenyan Small Tomato. If the recipient uses a moka pot — one of the most common home brewers, which builds pressure for a much stronger cup than pour-over and sometimes a thin layer of crema — fresh, medium-dark beans are the best match, and the top pick is FrontStreet's PWN Golden Mandheling. This bean comes from the Gayo Mountains of Aceh, Sumatra. After buying in the Mandheling green beans, PWN runs one machine sort plus three or more rounds of hand sorting from the fruit stage onward, guaranteeing beans of 18 mesh or larger for a more balanced, cleaner flavor while preserving Mandheling's distinctive herbs, pine, and spice and its sweetness. And if they have a home espresso machine, which extracts at nine bars of pressure and makes a standard espresso with ease, choose FrontStreet's classic blend for a gift: made from Brazil red Bourbon and Mandheling with a little Robusta added for crema, it delivers butter, roasted chestnut, dark chocolate, and caramel roast aromas, and doubles as a great way to practice latte art.