SUGAR MOUNTAIN

Baho Founder, Emmanuel Rusatira began trialing a process he calls ‘Intango’ during the 2018 harvest. The name comes from a Rwandan tradition in which fruit would be fermented in clay ‘intango’ jars to create a potent elixir for warriors to consume prior to battle. Emmanuel explains, it is an homage to local history and tradition. For the process, the best quality cherries are tightly packed into sealed jars and left to ferment for 48 - 100 hours. For this Fugi lot, the target fermentation time was 72 hours. In today’s specialty coffee vocabulary, it is ‘anaerobic’. But because all fermentation are anaerobic by definition, we like to refer to this process as a ‘low oxygen whole cherry fermentation’.  

This year's lot comes from Fugi Station. It was built in 2013 and then purchased by Emmanuel in 2016. It is the second smallest in the Baho network, serving 950 members and  is wholly dedicated to specialty grade coffee. For Intango lots, Baho selects specific high grade offerings. As Brendan Adams at Semilla explains: "the agreement was made that growers should commit to the same schedules of fertilization and harvesting, as well as delivery day, so that their lot could be grouped in this way. This type of result is exactly what gets us excited about traceability - as we move past simply accepting cherries from farmers, we not only get the chance to return to them year after year, but we also can form a deeper relationship that results in a more holistic form of sourcing that we find to be more respectful".