Mountain Harvest's coffee has become one of our most popular Ugandas in a very short time. The coffee is rich in chocolate-covered raisin sweetness, it's full-bodied, and has just enough stone fruit flavor and earthy florals to make it a wonderful please-everyone profile.
Mountain Harvest is a very progressive producer group in Uganda, investing heavily in their farmers’ equity in the final product, as well as constantly diversifying their cup profiles available to buyers. This, in our experience, is about as good a coffee anyone can find in East Africa that is entirely processed by individual smallholders at home.
Mount Elgon and Mountain Harvest
Mount Elgon is a massive peak split nearly in two by the border of Uganda and Kenya. The “mountain” itself, now an extinct shield volcano, is more an enormous expanse of successive plateaus that float dramatically above the surrounding valley floor. It is also home to a dense patchwork of farming communities growing some of the best organic coffee in Africa.
Mountain Harvest is a very young and big-thinking group, first established in 2017. The company is dedicated to long-term economic and environmental sustainability for smallholders on Mt. Elgon. These farmers are Uganda’s highest and most diversified coffee growers with incredible quality potential thanks to the climate, soil fertility, and a longstanding culture of land stewardship. Historically, however, farmers on the mountain have struggled to meet specialty standards by processing coffee themselves, most often in tiny amounts on homemade equipment and with little direction.
In an effort to raise the economic standard in remote coffee-growing Elgon communities, Mountain Harvest began as an impact investing project underwritten by Lutheran World Relief (LWR). It has expanded in just a few years to include farmer education and training, central processing infrastructure, storage facilities throughout the region, detailed quality control, and international marketing. As of this year Mountain Harvest works with 850 individual smallholders across 8 communities on Mt. Elgon, with each farm growing between 600-1,000 coffee trees. Their coffee stands up to the best fully washed Ugandas arabicas we typically taste all year.
The Supply Chain
Mountain Harvest organizes growers by local community. They administer farm management and processing training to calibrate all producers to high specialty standards, and they expedite parchment to their centralized location in Mbale, at the foot of Mt. Elgon. In Mbale, each delivery is cupped against a strict and detailed qualitative and physical grading system and allocated accordingly. A typical smallholder picks coffee daily during harvest, depulps on hand-cranked or generator-powered depulpers, sometimes shared between neighboring households, and ferments overnight in small plastic tubs or nylon sacks. Coffee is then rinsed clean and dried in a thin layer on ground tarps, or, increasingly, raised screens to improve air circulation.
Over the course of a full harvest, individual parchment deliveries are built into blended containers, single-community lots, and single-delivery microlots for sale. Mountain Harvest's pricing to their producers is a minimum of 10-30% above local market prices, and often involves additional premiums for quality. Unlike other regional buyers who exclusively process centrally or buy low grade, humid, smallholder parchment, Mountain Harvest invests in farmers’ capacity to produce high-specialty, fully-dried parchment coffee within their own resources, helping them maximize their margin when they sell.
