Mountain Harvest’s coffee has quickly become one of the most popular and sought after East Africas we offer. It’s limited, admirably sourced, and insanely good.
One of their most recent expansions has been to the Rwenzori mountains, in Uganda’s West. In true Mountain Harvest fashion, the expansion began not with aggressive cherry buying but with the slow and steady training of local agronomists, processing education, and the full network of financial services they developed on Mt. Elgon over five years.
The Rwenzoris are synonymous with naturals (and usually not good ones), but our Crown Jewel from this project is a traditional honey process. The coffee was pulped and dried carefully in three stages, resulting in a creamy, tangy cup with tropical fruit and chocolate truffle. One of the Crown cuppers described the flavor balance as “precise”, which, if you think about it, is about the highest praise available for an unconventional coffee, and the effort itself of producing it.
Welcome to the Rwenzoris
Geographically, the Rwenzori mountains are a colossal anomaly to the rest of Uganda's landscape. They explode steeply from the surrounding lowlands in a dense, craggy outpouring of mineral rock, less than 20 miles across but including Africa’s second highest peak at over 5,000 meters (the peak, Mt. Stanley, is the highest non-volcanic, non-tectonic mountain on Earth). As you can imagine, the way up includes an incredible range of microclimates, everything from tropical rainforest, arid loamy hillsides, alpine meadows and glacial fields. Coffee in this area reaches elevations as high or higher than on Mt. Elgon, in Uganda’s East, but it has always been less established and of much lower reputation. Because of this the Rwenzori mountains represent one of the highest-potential, but least-realized, regions in Africa’s specialty coffee. There are a number of specialty groups working to establish themselves here, with varying goals and levels of success.
Uganda as a whole just doesn’t have widespread highland territories like nearby Kenya or Ethiopia. Nearly the entire country is low, tropical, and consistently warm, save for only three dramatic and concentrated exceptions: Mt. Elgon in the East, the Kigezi highlands in the southwest corner, and the Rwenzori Mountains in the West. The country is otherwise well suited for Coffea canephora (robusta), which grows wild here and is commercially critical as well: 80% of Uganda’s almost 9 million annual exportable bags are robusta. If you’ve tasted great coffee from Uganda (and many have not), chances are it came from one of only a handful of producer groups, and chances are also that they were founded in the past 10 years. Arabica, and especially great tasting arabica, is still incredibly scarce.
Mountain Harvest
Mountain Harvest is a young and big-thinking group, first established in 2017 in Mbale, near Mt. Elgon. Mountain Harvest’s entire structure was designed from scratch to be the antithesis of Uganda’s typical arabica value chains. They specialize in farmer empowerment, transparent pricing in all directions, and slow and steady processing innovation. They invest heavily in their farmers’ equity in the final product, as well as constantly diversifying their cup profiles available to the world.
For its first 5 years, Mountain Harvest dedicated itself to smallholders on Mt. Elgon. They began in Mbale as an impact investing project underwritten by Lutheran World Relief, and for the first couple years were based in a dilapidated dry mill deserted by a bankrupted cooperative union. By the end of this short first phase the business model included farmer education and training, investments in centralized processing, community storage facilities, detailed quality control, and international marketing. All the while staying very modest in size, exporting only five to seven containers per year.
In 2022 Mountain Harvest set its sights on the Rwenzori Mountains, for the same reasons: incredible quality potential and under-resourced arabica growers. Within a couple years, they were working there full time, processing cherry centrally at their “Mountains of the Moon” station, and marketing the results.
Honey Processing at “Mountains of the Moon”
This small lot of coffee was processed as a traditional, low intervention honey, albeit a very meticulous one. Mountain Harvest recruits farmers for specific processing projects, typically by community or by harvest day. In this case, 600 farmers from two communities contributed cherry over a short period of time. Fresh cherry was delivered each picking day, sorted for ripeness and consistency and immediately depulped. Once depulped, the parchment and its full mucilage was moved to a full-sun section of raised screen beds to dry for 2-3 days, allowing a rapid extraction of moisture from the mucilage and seed while limiting the residual fermentation. After this first drying stage the parchment was moved to a different set of beds in full shade, where it was carefully rotated over many days until the moisture content reached 15%. From this stage, the parchment was moved back into full sun to achieve the final 11% moisture content, and then finally to a temperature-controlled warehouse for long-term curing.
