Uganda Zebugu-Busi

The Coffee Gardens

The Coffee Gardens were established in 2017 with the goal of producing incredible specialty coffee in an ethical way, offering a transparent and direct link between coffee farmers and coffee consumers.

The Producers Contributing to This Lot

Micro-lots were assembled by combining day-lots (coffee processed on the same day) with similar taste profiles. Therefore, a single farmer may contribute to multiple micro-lots and many farmers will contribute to a single lot.

The Coffee Gardens have been working with the farmers who produced this micro-lot for the past five years. It is named after the village Zebugu-Busi, where many of these farmers live. The farmers have coffee gardens of different sizes and so supply different amounts of coffee. Mr Masaba Charles from Zebugu-Busi was one of the biggest contributors to this micro-lot with 512 kg of ripe, red coffee cherries.

Processing

Within hours of being picked, the coffee cherries are carried down to our station in 50 kg bags by “runners” – a team of over 160 women and men employed from the local community. This coffee is pulped before undergoing a fermentation method involving a pre-wash, a long soak in cold mountain spring water, and then a gentle long fermentation lasting forty hours before a final wash. This coffee is meticulously sorted at 12 different stages before it is exported.