Brewing change

From the slopes of Uganda to a barn in north Yorkshire, journalist Lucy Denyer explores the journey of coffee.

It’s mid-July and outside, it’s pouring with rain. Inside, however, the atmosphere is a mixture of cosy – a comforting smell of slightly burnt toast – and science-lab serious. On a table in front of me are six ceramic cups. Neatly lined up next to them are small cards with tasting notes. In the centre, a mug containing a handful of specialist spoons. Inside the cups: coffee.

 I am at Rounton Coffee Roasters, deep in the North Yorkshire countryside, about to undergo a “cupping” session, an activity carried out weekly by the Rounton staff to assess their produce for quality and taste.

Jamiel El-Sharif, Rounton’s Head of Coffee, reverently pours just-boiled water onto the six cups and we wait as the aromas start to emerge and the grounds bubble to the surface. All of the coffee being tasted today is freshly roasted, which means few bubbles emerge, as the CO2 hasn’t yet had a chance to escape. Once the coffee has spent some time infusing, we scoop and turn the coffee in its cup using the special bowl-shaped cupping spoons, then inhale. The next step is to skim off the scum.

Finally we taste: a quick inhalation of coffee drawn in over the tongue. The flavours are as varied as they might be in wine: there are ‘natural’ coffees with a funky, earthy, almost farmyard-like smell and flavour, a Yellow Bourbon coffee from Colombia that has notes of red apple and marshmallow and, my favourite, a Granary Blend coffee with familiar suggestions of chocolate, hazelnut and caramel, that contains beans that come from Brazil, El Salvador and Uganda. And the Ugandan beans in this coffee have not only travelled some 4,000 miles to get here, they are part of an initiative that is transforming lives and livelihoods in this part of East Africa.

A world obsessed

Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world. Globally, we drink 126 million 60kg bags of it a year; a report produced earlier this year by market researcher Circana found that total coffee servings had a 5 per cent year-on-year increase. Every month seems to bring increasingly inventive ways to drink it: as a pour-over, in a cafetière, brewed in a stovetop pot, drawn through an Aeropress, produced from a pod or spooned from a jar as freeze-dried granules. Cold coffee is the trend du jour: Circana’s research found that in China – which has seen the highest growth rate in coffee consumption – cold coffee makes up a third of total coffee consumption.

But we probably rarely think about the journey of bean to cup. Or even what happens before that, when the coffee “cherries” are plucked from the trees where they are grown and start their transformation into that dark, aromatic beverage we all love so much. I'm here to find out more about that journey.
 

Boosting quality

In 2015, Jonny Rowland moved to Uganda and, with a team of three people, set up a business in Kisinga, a coffee station at the foot of the Rwenzori Mountains.

Coffee has been grown in this part of Uganda forever. The robusta plant, which produces the less refined, heartier beans you’ll largely find in mass-market blends or instant coffee, is native to Ugandan soils, and remains a source of livelihood for millions of smallholder farmers. Uganda remains the 8th biggest coffee producer in the world, and is the largest coffee exporter in East Africa and the second largest producer (Ethiopia produces more coffee, but also consumes more).

In the early 1900s, colonial settlers introduced speciality arabica beans (which now account for 20 per cent of Uganda’s coffee production), and for years, farmers scratched out a living by growing small amounts of coffee around what they produced for their own families, and selling it, cash in hand, for around 10p per kilo. The coffee, although the crop was good, was of a fairly poor quality once it came to sale time, having been dried and stored badly, so the return was low. But Ugandans don’t traditionally drink coffee, so nobody knew
any better.

“I could see the low-hanging fruit – the lack of the basics being done,” explains Jonny, who had a degree in agriculture from Reading University, but had “always had a bit of a bug for Africa”, his parents having lived in Uganda in the late 1980s. “The farmers were trapped in a cycle of very poor quality practices leading to poor quality outputs.” So he started Agri Evolve, with the aim of improving the livelihoods of smallholder coffee farmers through improved agri-business – paying a fair market price for the unprocessed arabica coffee ‘cherries’ (the coffee berry is red like a cherry, hence the nickname) and then processing them properly, to then sell the dried green beans on to roasteries back in the UK.

Today, Agri Evolve employs a permanent team of 90 and seasonal staff of another 200; annual turnover is about USD 12m, with a factory and assets worth another $2m. The team buys between 6,000 and 8,000 tonnes of coffee a year, coffee from between 15,000 and 20,000 farmers, with the bulk of trade done with 12,000 Rainforest Alliance-certified farmers and a further 1,500 certified organic farmers. Some 3,000 tonnes are then exported to coffee roasters around the world.  

Hoovering popcorn

Despite the rain, the roasting barn at Rounton is a hive of activity. In one corner are two enormous tubs of what look like browny-green peanuts with a strong almost weed-like smell. These are the raw ‘green’ coffee beans that Rounton buys from suppliers around the world – including Agri Evolve: last year, Rounton bought about eight tonnes of the company’s coffee.

A switch is flipped, and what looks like a big vacuum cleaner hose powers up, sucking beans into a huge hopper positioned over the roasting drum. A bed of 20 burners fires up; when the drum has come to temperature – around 255-260°C for a batch of Agri Evolve’s Katanda washed beans – the coffee will be let into the roaster and turned constantly for about 11 minutes. Inside, the beans will expand, crack and pop open like popcorn before being dropped out and cooled as rapidly as possible in the cooling tray attached to the side of the roaster.

“Rounton was one of the very first roasteries I went to,” recalls Martin Rowland, Jonny’s father, who is also based in Yorkshire and, by his own admission when his son first sent him some coffee to try and sell five years ago, knew very little about it.

“It was very different to a Nescafé with two sugars, which is how I used to drink my coffee,” he laughs.

When Rowland senior first started his coffee-selling journey, Ugandan coffee did not have a very good reputation: it was known primarily as a robusta-producing market. Nothing daunted, he set off with the two tonnes of coffee he was sent – around 34 bags – and set about selling them. Now, he says, “I have customers from Aberfeldy in Perthshire down to Totnes in south Devon."

“The coffee community is amazing. Everybody is so friendly and supportive – I often cold-call on people and have never had the door shut in my face. Sometimes I ask for a few minutes of somebody’s time and an hour later, the conversation’s
still going.”

But then, it’s hard not to be seduced by the story of this small company that is changing lives in Uganda, and producing great coffee to boot. As well as dealing with coffee farmers, Agri Evolve works with the International Tree Foundation (ITF) to supply trees for farmers to plant – over 200,000 in the last few years – and also pays youth teams to build simple, energy-efficient stoves for farmers which reduce the amount of firewood used, meaning fewer trees are cut down.

Good trees are, in fact, an essential part of the coffee-growing process. Not only do they maintain and optimise soil health, enriching soil with additional nutrients to the extent that crop production has been known in some instances to have increased by 200 per cent, but coffee, particularly the arabica variety, requires shade to grow well.

There are other benefits too: the Albizia, Musizi and bak trees used in the Agri Evolve and ITF partnership not only minimise the rate of water evaporation but their leaves, when decomposed, work as manure in the plantation; bamboo grass is also being planted as part of the partnership as they absorb water and hold firm the river banks they are planted near, preventing the fertile soils from being washed away. More generally, climate change-induced flooding and landslides in the Rwenzori mountains are mitigated by more trees.

Back in Rounton’s tasting area, I swill, then sip, my Granary Blend coffee, with beans that have come all the way from Uganda’s Rwenzori mountains. It is delicious. I leave with several bags of coffee to take home. Just one more step on the journey from bean to cup.

This article first appeared in Trees, ITF’s annual journal

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