Story
Rwanda is a special country for us. Few other places in the world demonstrate as vividly the transformation that just a couple decades of focus, investment, and extensive collaboration can impart. It is a place we are always proud to support, and especially since visiting in 2019, it has remained a fundamental aspect of our menu that we hope to never stop building upon.
The Humure community washing station is located in the Remera Sector, Gatsibo District, Eastern Province of Rwanda. Interestingly, the landscape here is not especially ideal for excellent coffee—unlike the southern and western regions of Rwanda, the east has a much drier climate and much flatter topography. Though coffee grows quite abundantly here, the barriers to quality are higher than elsewhere, and therefore the Humure team’s ability to continue producing such stellar lots is quite commendable. Under the leadership of current station manager Stratton Nzaramba, Humure is not only capable of yielding an exceptional 100 tonnes of exportable green coffee per year, but they also turn out a number of excellent smaller lots like this one, finished with meticulously managed washed and natural processes.
Humure is one of twelve stations (ten in Rwanda, two in Burundi) owned by Baho Coffee, a group founded by Emmanuel Rusatira and his family in 2015. Emmanuel, with many years’ experience in coffee processing and exporting, identified Rwanda’s potential for improvements in quality, traceability, and financial impact for smallholders. Like most of East Africa, the vast majority of Rwandan coffee farmers have very little land of their own, reinforcing the importance of shared infrastructure as well as centralized logistics and administration at central processing locations. By zooming in on processing improvements, sub-regional separation, and maintaining active, supportive relationships within producing communities throughout the year, Baho’s stations have rapidly set a new quality standard over the past ten years.
On a broader scale, coffee production has grown massively since the late 1990s. As the country steadily rebuilt its economy in the wake of the genocide, the number of washing stations went from only two to over 300 today. All the way to the end of the twentieth century, Rwanda’s coffee production operated under a model of high volume and low quality, with the overwhelming majority under the control of a single company—Rwandex. Only in the late 90s and early 2000s, amidst tremendous institutional and social change, did the Rwandan government—with the help of international NGOs—establish a plan to transform the reputation of Rwandan coffee.
Despite the incredible progress that has been made over the past 30 years, and in spite of the Rwandan National Agricultural Export Board’s efforts to enforce a sound financial framework, still a troubling amount of Rwanda’s coffee profits elude producers, and that is precisely why we prioritize working with a Rwandan-owned operation like Baho. Radical growth notwithstanding, Rwanda’s coffee sector remains small enough that a strong contingent of principled buyers can make a difference. As our importing partners at Semilla state: “The potential for impacting the overall economic well-being of the country is possible via coffee, but it must be optimized for that purpose. First and foremost, we believe that more profit must go to locals rather than major multinationals; and secondly, quality and prices must continue to increase.”
We are proud to contribute to these efforts, and enthusiastic about tasting fresh offerings season after season. This season’s washed Red Bourbon from Humure immediately struck us for its sticky red fruit and tea-like florals, and especially given its comparatively challenging geography, we were thrilled to highlight the work of Stratton Nzaramba and his team. In the cup, we taste black cherry, oolong tea, and hibiscus.
