🇺🇬 Rwenzori Mountains Honey

Green arrived August 2026 alongside the Yemen and hasn’t been roasted yet. Provenance and reasoning below. Roast data and tasting notes follow the first batch.

A second Ugandan, from a different mountain

We already roast a Mbale lot from the slopes of Mount Elgon, on the Kenyan border in the east of the country. This one comes from the opposite side: the Rwenzori range, which runs along the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the west.

The Rwenzoris are unusual mountains. They are not volcanic, unlike Elgon and most of the East African highlands, but a block of much older rock pushed up along the Albertine Rift, which makes them the highest non-volcanic, non-orogenic range in the world. They carry some of the only permanent glaciers in Africa. Ptolemy’s Mountains of the Moon, the ones classical geographers put at the source of the Nile, are generally taken to be these.

The range runs about 120 km long and 65 km wide along the Congolese border, and tops out at Margherita Peak on Mount Stanley, 5,109 m. The coffee grows nowhere near that. Farms sit on the lower and middle slopes of the eastern face, in the Kasese, Bundibugyo and Kabarole districts, roughly between 1,200 and 2,200 m. The altitude is what makes arabica work in a country whose coffee exports are overwhelmingly robusta.

Two arabicas from the same country, grown on two geologically unrelated mountain ranges about 600 km apart, is a comparison we can run properly once both are roasted. That is most of why this lot came in the same order.

Honey process

The cherry is pulped to remove the skin, then dried with the mucilage still attached to the seed instead of being washed off. The sugars in that mucilage stay in contact with the bean through drying, which usually lands somewhere between a washed coffee’s clarity and a natural’s sweetness and body.

It also demands attention during drying. Mucilage left on a drying bed will ferment if it isn’t turned, so the process carries more risk than a washed coffee does, and the quality of the result depends heavily on how carefully the drying was managed.

How we plan to roast it

Unknown until we’ve cupped it. The Mbale takes a medium-dark roast because its character is chocolate and body, and both need development to arrive. Whether a honey-processed Rwenzori wants the same treatment or something considerably lighter is exactly the question the first batch is for.