This Kajare lot is a new one for us as well as the community that produced it. It comes from Mountain Harvest in Uganda. Mountain Harvest has been buying farm-washed parchment for the last five years from the Kajare community. But this year they built a micro washing station so that they can purchase cherry within the heart of the community. This puts the processing in the hands of Mountain Harvest and allows for increased quality control measures as well as experimentation. It also provides Mountain Harvest an outpost to better educate smallholder farmers on quality. 

David Woniala is the Processing Manager at Kajare. The cherry is sourced from Lusha, Bulaago, Gombe, Zemasito, Bunasufwa, and Bugatisa villages within the Kajere community in the North Mount Elgon region. This washed coffee is dry fermented in cherry for 40 hours in sealed drums, then pulped and dry fermented for 24 hours in sealed drums, hand-rubbed for about 30 minutes, and then wet fermented for another 24hrs in open drums. Afterward, the coffee is washed, soaked, rinsed, and placed on the drying beds in a solar dryer to a moisture of 11%. These processing steps are what help make this coffee stand out with good sweetness and acidity. Traditionally, coffee has not been processed this way in Uganda. With Mountain Harvest’s focus on producing specialty coffee, they are changing the paradigm of what coffee from Uganda can taste like.