Overview
For our final washed Rwanda of the season, we’re thrilled to welcome back a single farm lot from Jean Marie Vianney (JMV) Usekanabagoyi. We’ve been consistently purchasing this coffee since 2021 when our exporting partners, Baho Coffee, first started experimenting with smaller lot separations.
This initiative immediately sparked our interest and kickstarted discussions on how to expand and deepen this type of traceability. As buyers, it’s always exciting to find more information about where coffee is coming from; but additionally, Emmanuel made it very clear that it was helpful to Baho and their producer network as well. It created the opportunity to directly support smallholders and hopefully motivate them to continue in specialty.
Usekanabagoyi grows Red Bourbon on his 2 hectare farm in the famed Nyamasheke district of Rwanda and delivers cherry to the Ngoma station. His coffee is kept separate throughout the entire process of sorting, drying, storing, milling, etc. No easy feat! This level of traceability and dedication to coffee growing is rarely seen throughout a country where the average farm size is only 0.25 hectares, and coffees are more commonly blended together with cherry from thousands of other smallholders at centralized stations. Many thanks go out to Emmanuel and the entire Baho team for making this dream a reality!
Our importing partner, Sundog Trading, shares: After finally meeting JMV during our visit in 2022, we can confidently claim that the lively, dynamic characteristics of his coffee align perfectly with his personality. Since day one, JMV has been on board with Baho protocols and dedicated to delivering each season to Ngoma. He takes a few extra steps at the farm level - like selecting only the ripest cherries, floating, and sorting defects - all before taking cherries to the station. For the extra efforts, JMV receives a bonus of +50 rwf/kg added to his cherry prices and a second payment of 50 rwf/kg later in the year.
When asked about the single farmer initiative, Emmanuel shared: These are farmers that do coffee farming as business and they really show full commitment to their work. They serve as models in good agricultural practices, soil management, erosion control, environmental conservation practices as well as giving jobs to many other small farmers in need. The reason why Baho selected to process and market their production separately from others is because we wanted to motivate them. Selling coffee in their names makes them proud and increases their energy and commitment. It is very easy to ask them to implement all our quality control protocols and it is also easy to have full information about their farms through our records taking system. We wish that, in future, this coffee will be served in coffee shops in the names of these farm owners.
We’re honored to continue featuring some of the very first single producer lots from Rwanda and look forward to continuing investment into the future of this initiative. Our selection from JMV Usekanabagoyi is structured, complex, and incredibly sweet - just as we’ve come to expect from the washed offerings that we purchase from Baho. This coffee presents a harmonious balance between a darker, saturated sweetness and clean, elegant stone fruit flavors. We’re tasting: dried apricot, candied orange peel, fig jam, plum, cherry, vanilla, rooibos tea, baking spices, honey, sugarcane.
Relationship
This is our sixth consecutive year purchasing from Emmanuel Rusatira and his private exporting company, Baho Coffee. Our Director of Coffee formed his own company in 2019, Sundog Trading, and partnered with Emmanuel to begin importing coffees from Baho into North America. We’re excited to be early supporters of the project and can’t wait to see where this relationship takes us in the future.
After nearly 20 years of experience establishing and managing washing stations throughout Rwanda for a large export company, Emmanuel Rusatira and his family decided to branch out and start their own operations. Establishing Baho Coffee allowed him to freely focus his energy towards implementing his personal philosophies and pushing high quality protocols with his own privately owned stations. Emmanuel is impressively proactive with education and outreach. He works closely with producers year round - distributing seedlings, educating on proper growing and picking techniques, giving loans for infrastructure or quality of life investments, and generally being a positive force in the community and friend to all.
From Sundog Trading: The Rwanda coffee sector is unique in that it’s extremely small, which means that it’s possible for buyers to have a serious impact on the entire market. With an average annual export of between 267,000 - 400,000 bags, Rwandese coffee is a drop in the bucket of world coffee production. For context - Costa Rica, considered the smallest producer in Central America, produces 1.6 million bags annually, and Colombia produces 15 - 18 million annually. Coffee represents 25% of Rwanda’s total export economy, meaning that the government's efforts to make coffee a valuable sector for profit and employment generation has reaped huge benefits. 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 the profits must go to locals rather than major multinationals; and secondly, quality and prices must continue to increase.
We’re excited to be working with Baho Coffee for these very reasons. Emmanuel is one of a very small group of Rwandese people who are exporting their own coffee; this means that profits are remaining within the country and are being reinvested back into people. There is a deep level of commitment and respect between Emmanuel, his employees, and the farmers who deliver to Baho stations. Unlike many multinational companies, he is directly invested in the future of his own country. Working with and buying from Baho Coffee is meaningful to us in many ways; but at the heart of it all, we’re trying to support the Rwanda coffee sector by purchasing Rwandese coffee from Rwandese people.
Processing
As previously mentioned, initial processing steps like floating and cherry sorting are done at home by JMV and family before delivering to the station. Cherry delivery generally occurs within 4 hours from time of picking.
Cherries are depulped, and the wet parchment then undergoes a 14 hour dry fermentation before being pushed through the grading channels. Here the coffee is rigorously washed to remove any remaining mucilage and separated by density - with the highest density lots being reserved for our selections.
Coffee is then moved onto shaded drying beds for 12 - 72 hours, which is a unique step in Rwanda known as skin drying. This step has two distinct benefits. First, it sets the trajectory for the entire drying phase by initially beginning very gently and slowly under complete shade. Secondly, it allows ample time for intensive sorting while the parchment is still wet - this is important because certain defects (seeds bitten by Antestia in particular, thought to cause the potato defect) can be seen much more easily when the parchment is wet.
The parchment is finally moved into full sun on raised drying beds, where it’s very frequently turned until drying is complete. Thanks to the cool breezes coming off of Lake Kivu, drying times are rather long at Ngoma - 45 days total for this lot.
Brewing
Coffees from JMV offer a lot of complex flavors to play with. You’ll want to use a relatively coarse grind size for brewing, as this will help keep the coffee tasting bright, clean, and transparent. As you slightly tighten grind sizes, you’ll find that the sweetness and acidity intensifies. Our ideal flavor profile allows these juicier flavors to shine - like plum, orange, and sugarcane.
If your coffee tastes thin, sour, and lacking sweetness - like an under ripe plum - try grinding finer.
If your coffee tastes cloying, intense, and bitter - like over steeped black tea - try grinding coarser.
