Here’s some video and commentary from a recent trip to the Western mountains of Uganda’s coffee lands, The Rwenzori range.
NOTE: I used some commercial music (shouldn’t have!) so they put ads on the video. I didn’t put the ads there. Sorry!
Uganda has generally been looked at as a higher volume producer of East African coffee, and not as a source with the best quality cup. In that way, Kampala is full of large mills from the big multinational coffee export companies.
Small quality-oriented exporters are not here doing their thing, so the encouragement of higher quality from small farm or cooperatives has not been a focus.
Other challenges here are the weather, which can be very wet during the time they need to be drying coffeeAfter coffee is picked, it must be dried. In both dry-process and wet-process (and the other hybrid processes like pulp natural and forced demucilage) the coffee must always.... This is especially an issue in the Eastern region bordering KenyaKenya is the East African powerhouse of the coffee world. Both in the cup, and the way they run their trade, everything is topnotch.: Kenya is the East..., near Mbale town.
The western area of the Rwenzori mountains has good altitude for high quality coffee. But the system of collection of cherry
Either a flavor in the coffee, or referring to the fruit of the coffee tree, which somewhat resembles a red cherry.: Either a flavor in the coffee, or... hasn’t been set up for it. And there is not much coffee that is wet-processed from this region.
The dry processDry process coffee is a method for taking the fruit from the tree to an exportable green bean. The whole intact coffee cherry is dried in the sun... coffee is called Drugar in the trade, and I admit the name confused me for years. I thought it was a Ugandan ethnic group that produced coffee in this area. But in fact it is an acronym: DR-UG-AR: DR= Dry Process, UG= Uganda, AR= ArabicaArabica refers to Coffea Arabica, the taxonomic species name of the genus responsible for around 75% of the worlds commercial coffee crop.: Arabica refers to Coffea Arabica, the... !
There are some good varieties of coffee grown here, similar to Kenya it is common to find Scott Lab varieties like SL-28Scott Labs selection 28 Kenya cultivar, a preferred type with Bourbon and Mokka heritage. It supposedly is selected from Tanganyika DR cultivar, found by A.D. Trench on a.... –Thompson
(This is a 2018 video, updated the article 2020)
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