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 more recent expansions has been to the Kigezi Highlands, a wide and high elevation territory in Uganda’s Southwest that shares a border with northern Rwanda. In true Mountain Harvest fashion, their value chain in Kigezi 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.
This has got to be one of the most elegant straight naturals from Uganda we’ve ever tasted. The cup is lavender-like with grape candy and rose jam, invigorating lemongrass, strawberry, and a rich pastry sweetness underneath all the top notes. The long ocean transit seems to have only opened up the flavors even more.
Welcome to the Kigezi Highlands
Close your eyes and picture western Rwanda: steep grassy
mountainsides groomed with perfect terraces, deep blue lakes, forest gorillas. This is Uganda’s Kigezi Highlands. Geographically, this region is a stark contrast to the rest of Uganda's landscape. Uganda as a whole just doesn’t have other widespread highland territories like this. 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, and the Rwenzori Mountains in the West. Coffee-wise the country is well suited for Coffea canephora (robusta), which grows wild here and is comercially 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.
The Kigezi Highlands maintain a consistent high elevation across many kilometers, rarely dropping below 1,500 meters, and climbing as high as 2,700. Despite the fact that coffee itself is underdeveloped, mountainside farming overall is well established here. The districts in the Kigezi Highlands are not especially known for coffee and are far behind Mt. Elgon and even the Rwenzori mountains in notoriety. That said, the terroir here is an extension of Rwanda’s, and vice versa. It should be no surprise that incredible coffees are likely, with the right effort.
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, presciently, 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.
In 2023, they started working in the Kigezi Highlands, with a local producer group there called Kigezi Valley Coffee (KVC). This has been a small and very precise initiative, with only 300 smallholders belonging to KVC, but with Mountain Harvest’s full suite of expertise applied.
Natural Processing at KVC & A Brief History of Nyasaland
This small lot of coffee was processed as a traditional, low intervention natural. Ripe cherries were delivered daily by farmers, sorted for impurities, and moved immediately to raised screen beds to dry. While drying the cherry was consistently rotated and monitored until reaching the final 11% moisture content, at which point the dried pods were transported to Mountain Harvest’s temperature controlled warehose in Mbale to cure and stabilize for two full months.
Nyasaland, the cultivar grown in this part of Kigezi, is rarely found these days but is a kind of antique with an interesting past.
Nyasaland is a typica lineage arabica first brought to Malawi (then known as Nyasland) from Jamaica in the late 19th century. This was very early-stage commercial East African coffee, but the British colony of Nyasland was flourishing at the time and the variety was widely planted. Nyasland’s climate, however, was not nearly as cool or amenable to the fragile arabica genetics, and much of the new arabica plants overbore, then dropped production dramatically, leaving Nyasland with a cratered coffee sector (that still struggles today). The variety was moved north to Uganda in the early 20th century where, despite its fragility and lower yields, is still a favored arabica heirloom in higher elevations.
