Uganda has overtaken Ethiopia as the leading producer of coffee in Africa, which represents a huge accomplishment! While the majority of that production (80-85%) is Robusta, the Arabica quality isvery high, especially in the mountainous Rwenzori region, whence our Sipi Fall organic offering.
Sipi Falls, named after the mountain’s most famous waterfall just down the road, is a centralized wet mill located in the Kapchorwa district that buys and processes cherry from 8,000 organic and diversified farms across the northern part of the mountain. The sheer volume of quality coffee produced by this single wet mill is a testament to the truly ideal conditions of elevation, biological wealth, and human experience that abound between the farmers and Sipi Falls’ management team. Not to mention the ingenious business model itself, which, more than 20 years after its founding, continues to be a leader in affordable, certified coffee of the highest quality on the continent. The wet mill was Africa’s first certified organic producer, in 2002.Farmers across Mt. Elgon for years have been (and still are) accustomed to rudimentary home processing techniques. The vast majority of coffee coming off the mountain is pulped in tiny batches, often on borrowed equipment, and fermented in a bucket or a nylon bag prior to being tarp-dried on the ground, or at best on a mesh screen a few inches above the patio. The team at Kawacom, the export company that built the Sipi Falls mill, recognized greater potential in the landscape than previously seen, and set about to capture that potential at scale.
Varietals represented here, Bourbon, SL14, SL28, Blue Mountain, have thrived in Uganda and many of theproducing countries in East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi most notably) for a long while and
while sharing many properties across borderlines, but remain uniquely Ugandan in cup profiles. We preferthe light-light medium roast profile for this coffee. I like to think of the lemony and chocolately notes as an amalgam of washed Rwanda/Ethiopia/Kenya
