It is testament to how wide, wild, and wonderful the world of coffee is that this many years into our existence as a roasting company, we can still debut MULTIPLE producing countries on our menu in one fine summer. Uganda is the first of two new-to-us African origins you’ll be seeing over the next several months (spoiler alert: TANZANIA TOO), and even amidst a glorious gauntlet of coffees from tried/true favorites like Ethiopia, Guatemala, and Bolivia, Sylvia Achebet of Masha Coffee has managed to vault all the way to the highest echelons of our collective anticipation. 

Sylvia launched Masha Coffee from her household farm in Buginyanya, Mt. Elgon, northeastern Uganda, with the stated goal of working “more directly with the 1,000 [women] smallholders in her region by hosting workshops on gender, environmental protection and organic practices,” as our importing partner Crop to Cup conveyed to us. Her network is now vast and strong, and earlier this year she even added her own washing station in Sipi Falls, giving her even wider access to the region’s peak growing areas. Rest assured we will be eagerly checking up on this project in the years ahead, but for now, we’re extremely happy with this blend of SL-14 and SL-28 varieties (typically associated with Kenya!), altogether forming a lot with an incredibly distinct and delicious flavor profile. One of the first free-associative comments that came to mind when sipping this sample was SANDY — but not in the gritty crevice-crowding sense of the word. The SANDY SPIRIT spoke to something more vast, wide, spicy, and as the coffee continued cooling down, simply epic. There is real fruit character here, but it’s dried fruit, just like the chocolatey character is more like true cacao nibs than a gooey candy bar. It’s all good stuff—GRAND stuff, you might say—but there’s a rustic, arid aura to it that reminds us of the greatest desert settings of sensational science fiction storytelling: that infamous cantina on Tatooine, the Wasteland of Mad Max, and, of course, the ultimate DESERT PLANET itself: Arrakis, AKA Dune, AKA that windswept landscape of your favorite Sci-Fi epic adaptation of the 2020’s, AKA Jim’s favorite sci-fi literary epic of the 1960’s.

BUT BACK TO UGANDA WHICH IS REAL: it is truly special to be able to represent not only Sylvia herself, but so many other women farmers contributing to this country’s coffee sector, one that is still overwhelmingly oriented toward cultivation of Robusta, the less tasty but far more prolific cousin to the Arabica coffee favored by specialty roasters. Today, only ~20% of the coffee coming out of Uganda is Arabica, and it’s only in two of the country’s opposite corners (northeast and southwest) where it’s even a viable aspiration. Most of this Arabica coffee comes from small homestead farms with 20 to 200 trees, which makes consistency a challenge, but also proves to those enmeshed in the process that there is some incredible range and potential among what’s produced. We are psyched to attest that Sylvia Achebet has tapped a great amount of that potential in this lot, and we’re honored to represent it on our menu.