#privatecollection

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Gordon & MacPhail Private Collection Caol Ila 1984/2021

The Caol Ila 1984/2021 from Gordon & MacPhail’s Private Collection is an outstanding example of the art of independent bottling. The Caol Ila Distillery, located on the Scottish island of Islay, is famous for its elegant, smoky whiskies that combine maritime notes with peaty depth.

The Private Collection is a premium range from Gordon & MacPhail and represents rarities from single casks of the highest quality. Each bottling is selected by hand and bottled at cask strength — the Caol Ila 1984 has an alcohol content of around 53.9% ABV.

Mountain Harvest's coffee has become one of the most popular Ugandas in a very short time. The coffee is rich in chocolate-covered raisin sweetness, full-bodied, and has just enough stone fruit flavor and earthy florals to make it an outstanding please-everyone profile.   

Mountain Harvest is a very progressive producer group in Uganda, investing heavily in their farmers' equity in the final product and constantly diversifying their cup profiles available to buyers. 

Mount Elgon and Mountain Harvest  

Mount Elgon is a massive peak split nearly in two by the border of Uganda and Kenya. The "mountain" itself, now an extinct shield volcano, is an enormous expanse of successive plateaus floating dramatically above the surrounding valley floor. It is also home to a dense patchwork of farming communities growing some of the best organic coffee in Africa.   

Mountain Harvest is a young and big-thinking group established in 2017 committed to long-term economic and environmental sustainability for smallholders on Mt. Elgon. These farmers are Uganda's highest and most diversified coffee growers with incredible quality potential thanks to the climate, soil fertility, and a longstanding culture of land stewardship. 

To raise the economic standard in remote coffee-growing Elgon communities, Mountain Harvest began as an impact investing project underwritten by Lutheran World Relief (LWR). It has expanded in just a few years to include farmer education and training, central processing infrastructure, regional storage facilities, detailed quality control, and international marketing. As of this year, Mountain Harvest works with 850 individual smallholders across eight communities on Mt. Elgon, with each farm growing between 600-1,000 coffee trees. Their coffee stands up to the best thoroughly washed Uganda Arabicas we typically taste all year.  

The Supply Chain 

Mountain Harvest organizes growers by the local community. They administer farm management and processing training to calibrate all producers to high specialty standards, and they expedite parchment to their centralized location in Mbale, at the foot of Mt. Elgon. In Mbale, each delivery is cupped against a strict and detailed qualitative and physical grading system and allocated accordingly. A typical smallholder picks coffee daily during harvest, de-pulps it on hand-cranked or generator-powered de-pulpers, sometimes shared between neighboring households, and ferments overnight in small plastic tubs or nylon sacks. Coffee is then rinsed clean and dried in a thin layer on ground tarps or, increasingly, raised screens to improve air circulation.  

This coffee from Takele Mammo Denbi, at 47 years old, is a brand-new participant in the Single Farmer Lots Program this year but has yet to be familiar with the direct export process. Takele is currently stepping down after many years as the Managing Director of the Yirgacheffe Coffee Farmers Cooperative Union, of which his farm has been a member. Takele has worked closely with the program, helping it to succeed, but avoiding conflict of interest excluded his coffee from the program. Takele cultivated this single farmer lot on his 8-hectare farm in the Konga district, located in the heart of the coveted Gedeo Zone—the narrow plateau section dense with savvy farmers whose coffee is known as “Yirgacheffe.”

The Konga cooperative is well-known for its quality, and it’s a distinct pleasure having individual farmers from this perennially impressive community to celebrate, not to mention one as dedicated to farmer opportunity as Takele.

The Single Farmer Lots Program

The Single Farmer Lots Program initiative is to remove single farmer lots from the more giant cooperative blends sold through the ECX, taking custody of these precious coffees through a direct sale. The program is a unique micro-channel of almost unprecedented specificity in coffee supply from Ethiopia. Farmers with the drive and means to sell directly are supported, and, in turn, buyers of Ethiopian coffee have access to a portfolio of single-farm lots, un-diluted by the typical cooperative- and exporter-level consolidations.