Coffee has grown on this mountain since 1912.

Mount Elgon is an extinct volcano straddling the Uganda–Kenya border. Its volcanic soil and altitude are why Bugisu Arabica cups the way it does — bright, structured, quietly sweet. Here's the batch's journey from slope to cup.

Drink up
Soil

Volcanic, well-drained

Elevation

1,600–2,200m

Temperature

15–24°C

Rainfall

1,200–1,800mm/yr

How coffee came to Bugisu

Arabica coffee didn't originate in Uganda — its roots trace back to Abyssinia, present-day Ethiopia. It was introduced to Bugisu in 1912, under the then British colonial administration, with the first plantings taking root in Bumudu parish, Budadiri County.

Mount Elgon's volcanic soil and altitude turned out to suit Arabica remarkably well, and over a century later, coffee is still grown the same way it always has been here: on small gardens, by individual farming families, on the mountain's slopes.

Grown against the middleman

Bugisu's coffee farmers have a long history of organising against exactly the kind of anonymous trading we've built this brand to avoid. In 1954, local growers formed the Bugisu Cooperative Union specifically to take control of marketing their own coffee — farmers said at the time that they'd come to regard the existing trading company as just another layer of middlemen standing between them and a fair price.

That history is part of why traceability matters so much to us. It's not a new marketing angle — it's a fight this region's farmers have been having for over seventy years.

From cherry to green bean

Grown

Smallholder gardens on the mountain's terraces, mostly organic by circumstance rather than certification — coffee grown the way it's always been here.

Picked

Ripe red cherry only, hand-picked in passes through the trees over the harvest — nothing stripped or machine-picked.

Washed

Pulped, fermented, and washed clean in fresh water, then dried slowly on raised mesh beds set above the ground to keep it clean — the "fully washed" on every bag.