Uprising Coffee Uganda Kapchorwa

It has been a while since Uprising Coffee was featured on KC Coffee Geek, so let’s break that trend right now with a fresh Ugandan coffee. Happy Monday!

Uprising Coffee

Purchase this coffee directly for $5/4oz or $18/12oz (also available in 5lbs!)

UPRISING COFFEE UGANDA KAPCHORWA

Uprising Coffee was founded in the central New Jersey city of Hopewell by Matt Hall in 2015. The roastery, outfitted with a North Coffee Roaster from Mill City Roasters, was built out and operating by the beginning of 2016 and today you can find Uprising Coffee all over New Jersey in coffee shops, grocery stores and bakeries. This morning I’m taking a look at Uprising’s current Uganda Kapchorwa.

This is a mix of SL14, SL28 and local Bugisu varieties grown buy 45 smallholder farmers around Kyagalani using the Kapchorwa Washing Station for processing. Coffee grows at 1700-2200masl in this region and this coffee is a washed selection, meaning the cherries are sorted, broken, washed of the sticky mucilage inside, and then the seeds inside we call coffee beans are laid out to dry. Uprising gives us tasting notes of, “chocolate cake, vanilla fudge, full bodied with a very smooth finish.” The bag indicates that this coffee should be good for any type of brewing method, espresso included.

I’m using my standard pourover method to evaluate this coffee: a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. The Origin has all but the middle three holes in the filter holder blocked and I’m using Kalita 155 filters. Grinder is a Knock Aergrind. I am doing a 30 second bloom followed by a total brew time of 3:00 for this one.

This coffee has a lot of sweetness in the aroma… scents of medium to heavily caramelized sugars just pour out of the cup. This is a medium-heavy to heavy bodied coffee and the first flavor that hits me as I take my sips is marshmallow. Big, fluffy, lighted roasted marshmallow and I get more of that sweetness in the finish and aftertaste, too. Running right up against that marshmallow flavor, I get chocolate brownie, too. That is a lot of sweetness and all those sugary flavors really sit on my palate with density and is probably where the heavy body of this coffee comes from. There are light hints of vanilla in this cup, too, which add a little dimension. To balance all of this sugary confectionary sweetness out, there is a bit of acidity provided that lands somewhere between apple and citrus for me. It’s hard to nail down exactly as the bright notes are there for accent and balance and don’t come into the flavor that much (even with the Third Wave Water for brewing water, which usually accentuates high notes in a coffee), but I think it’s from the SL28 in the coffee because there’s even a slightly savory component to the acidity, too, and more of that would lean toward that classic “tomato” flavor that Kenyan SL28 coffees can give.

All that being said, this coffee is a total sugar bomb and I’ll be finishing my bag off on the espresso machine at work. I already know this is going to be a crowd pleaser when brewed that way! If you like dense, sweet, chocolate and caramel-forward coffees with little fruitiness, here’s your pick, hands down! It’s like dessert in a cup without the guilt!