SUBSCRIBER RELEASE ONLY - Grand Cru: Uganda Sipi Falls Organic
SUBSCRIBER RELEASE ONLY - Grand Cru: Uganda Sipi Falls Organic
Shipping Friday 23rd November
Please note, should you order any other products with your Grand Cru, they will be held and shipped together on the 22nd November . If you require these products sooner please order them separately.
This single origin coffee is the product of an extraordinary initiative called The Sipi Falls Project. The cooperative comprises 20,000 smallholders who farm on Mount Elgon, Africa’s oldest and one of its largest volcanoes. Organic, fermented and naturally dried the beans release a chorus of intriguing flavours, sangria, cocoa, vanilla with a silky caramel finish.
Origin | Uganda
Roasters Notes | ideal espresso and filter brew coffee displaying a winey, sangria flavour with cocoa and vanilla notes and a silky caramel finish.
Organically certified, this coffee has been grown and harvested as part of what is known as the Sipi Falls Coffee Project in Kapchorwa, Eastern Uganda.
The Project was first founded in 2020 and now incorporates more than 20,000 smallholder producers spread over an incredible 16,000 hectares encompassing 3 million plus trees. The Bantu speaking Bagisu producers have been encouraged to improve agronomic practices in order to increase yield and improve quality. Today they are considered experts in arabica coffee production.
Sipi Falls is one of the natural wonders of the Mbale District. The Sipi River that cascades over a series of dramatic waterfalls is named after a locally grown plant that resembles a wild banana called a Sep and is prized for its medicinal properties. The river spills off Mount Elgon, originally called, Ol Doinyo Ilgoon by the Maasai, meaning Breast Mountain. Straddling the border with Kenya, Elgon is thought to have once been the largest and is certainly the oldest volcanic mountain in Africa.
A huge number of Shambas (plantations) are scattered around the mountain with most of the Typica, SL14 and SL28 varieties grown between 1300 and 1900 metres above sea level. The tortuous gullies and steep forest covered cliff faces make access to and from the area extremely difficult. There are few roads and what tracks exist are often washed away by the rains. Almost all of the coffee is packed off the mountain using donkeys.
The Sipi Falls Project has enabled small holder farmers to pool their resources and build a coffee production organisation of national significance. Formed initially to help farmers increase their coffee growing skills it is now a co-operative large enough to help leverage optimum prices for each farm. The Project has gone on to produce clean safe water for communities and to build state-of-the-art health clinics and school classrooms.
This Sipi Falls coffee is an anaerobic natural processed arabica coffee. The ripe beans are placed in fermentation tanks for five days where anaerobic fermentation promotes yeast and bacteria in the absence of oxygen. The fermented beans are left in the cherry and spread on drying beds in the sun. This processing method gives the beans a distinctive wine flavour.
While coffees marketed as Drugar (Dry Uganda Arabica) are grown along the Western border, this high grown Bagisu is now considered to be the superior of Uganda’s increasingly coveted coffees.
Uganda Sipi Falls 2024 harvest is an ideal espresso and filter brew coffee displaying a winey, sangria flavour with cocoa and vanilla notes and a silky caramel finish. A beautifully balanced coffee as stunning and as exotic as the forest clad Elgon mountainside on which it grows.
