ABOUT THIS COFFEE:
Norman Mukuru started out as an agronomist in western Uganda and then trained as an engineer, which is what pulled him properly into coffee. One of the country's largest coffee exporters hired him to build the places where farmers bring their ripe fruit to be weighed and washed, first in the west and then over on Mt Elgon in the east. That company collapsed in 2024. Norman kept going on his own.
What he started as a drying shed at the foot of the mountain is now The Coffee Yards, up in the hills above town, with raised drying beds, patios, stone tanks, two sorting machines and a generator of its own. Around three hundred small farmers bring their coffee to it. Most of them are tending somewhere between twenty and two hundred trees, and coffee is the only thing all year that puts cash in their hands, which is why Norman stopped renting out his drying space and started buying their fruit outright. It pays people faster.
The yard is somewhere to live as well as somewhere to work. There is housing on site, meals are shared, and Norman has built the place around that as much as around the equipment. The ground up here is volcanic, the same soil that grows the famous coffees over the border in Kenya.
