Humure Remera Hill – Low Oxygen Natural

Humure Washing Station

Humure is the largest processing station owned by Emmanuel Rusatira of Baho Coffee. Located in the Eastern Province of Rwanda, Humure collects cherry from 1500 smallholder farmers in the area and employs 220 people during the peak of the season.

In Sundog Trading’s words:
The station was newly constructed in 2017 by a different owner, but Emmanuel stepped in to purchase Humure during the 2018 season. He immediately made large investments in infrastructure – new fermentation tanks, new washing channels, and larger storage units – thus, increasing the production capacity by 20x in the first three years of operation. Though the region is currently dominated by banana and maize production, Baho has established an impressive seedling distribution program that’s mobilizing farmers to start planting more coffee.

About Remera Hill:

Remera Hill is one example of an ongoing appellation project started by Baho Coffee in 2019. Thanks to a lot of effort and detailed record keeping Emmanuel’s part, many of the lot separations offered to Sundog can be traced back to communities of smallholder producers surrounding specific hills. This is the second year of lot separations coming from the Remera Hill Group. It is comprised of a total of 154 smallholders, and this lot specifically has coffees from of total of 9 of them. Their names are:
NAHASON RUKARA
BONIFACE AHORUKOMEYE
GASPARD BAZATSINDA
EMMANUEL BENDA
CLAVER BIHOYIKI
JULIA CYURINYANA
DAMASCENE GAKWANDI
DAMIEN SIBANIRO
GILBERT SINDAYIGAYA

In Sundog’s words:
Our interest in smaller lot separations began in 2019 when Emmanuel presented to us a handful of coffees that were traced back to communities surrounding specific hills. This initiative immediately sparked our interest and kickstarted our discussions on how we could expand and deepen this type of traceability. As buyers, it’s always exciting to find more information about where coffee is coming from; but furthermore, Emmanuel made it very clear that it was helpful to Baho and their producer network as well. It created the opportunity to more directly support coffee growers and hopefully motivate them to continue in specialty.

Processing:

This coffee has undergone a low oxygen whole cherry fermentation. After careful sorting and multiple rounds of floating, top quality cherries are tightly packed into sealed plastic tanks where they are left to ferment, undisturbed and under shade for period of 40 hours. Following this fermentation, cherries are spread out in a single layer on raised drying beds and turned frequently. For Baho’s low oxygen coffees specifically, they stretch out the drying times by manipulating the amount of full sun the coffee receives before reaching it’s target moisture content of 10-11%. The total drying time for this lot specifically was 45 days.

Price Transparency:

2022 Rwanda national farmgate price for cherry* – 410 rwf/kg
Baho farmgate price paid for cherry* – 650 rwf/kg + 50 rwf/kg second payment
2022 FOT Kigali price paid to Baho Coffee – 5.44 usd/lb
FOB Price paid to Sundog Trading – 7.17 usd/lb
*Whole coffee cherries are typically 6x the weight of green coffee parchment.