humure
Humure, named after the highest hill in the area, is located in the Eastern Province of Rwanda. It’s currently the largest station in the Baho family - collecting cherry from 1500 smallholder farmers, producing 1300 60kg bags green coffee annually, and employing 220 people during the peak of the season.
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.
The goal of Humure has historically been to produce high volumes of slightly lower grade specialty coffee (think 80 - 85 points). Though that’s perhaps the quality level of the bulk of the coffee that goes through the station, we’re continually impressed at how many lots are scoring 86+ each season.
Humure will remain our focus for sourcing a more traditional, price-sensitive, consistent washed offering. We’re purchasing classic station level blends from a compilation of all growers in the surrounding area, and extra labor is not put towards micro lot separations. Nonetheless, because of Baho’s extremely detailed cherry collection records, we will always able to provide transparency on specifically which farmers delivered cherry on the particular collection days that make up each lot.