Mozambique Gorongosa Coffee

This coffee is grown by smallholder farmers under native trees on Mount Gorongosa in Mozambique, as part of a project that uses coffee to bring the forest back. Roasters describe a sweet, balanced cup with soft citrus and, in a medium roast, a nutty note.

Origin & Story

A coffee that began as a forest plan

Mozambique's civil war ran from 1977 to 1992. Gorongosa National Park was closed and abandoned in 1983, and restoration only began in 2004. Mount Gorongosa, the rainforested mountain beside the park, kept losing trees to farming; scientists quoted by the Associated Press estimated that it had lost about 40 percent of its original forest since 1970.

Coffee entered the plan as a way to give farmers a reason to keep trees standing. Park warden Pedro Muagura is credited with proposing it, and the Gorongosa Restoration Project, a partnership between the Mozambican government and the Carr Foundation, started its coffee project in 2014. Arabica needs shade, so the bushes go in under native trees rather than in cleared fields. The first harvest came in 2018, and before the project none of the farmers had ever tasted coffee.

The project started with fewer than a dozen growers. The number today is above 1,000, nearly half of them women, working about 200 hectares, or 494 acres, in three areas of the mountain called Canda, Tambarara and Sandundjira, across eight communities. Another report counts differently: about 5,000 smallholders benefit from the park's coffee, honey and cashew programs together.

Growing under the canopy

The shade comes from native hardwoods. The trees include East African mahogany, titi, albizia, muonha, panga panga and mussulo among them. While the young coffee matures, families grow beans, bananas, pineapples and other crops between the rows, so the land earns something before the first harvest. The Associated Press reported that farmers plant roughly 90 trees for every hectare of coffee, a figure from that one report. Harvest falls in the maize off-season, and the program employs around 300 seasonal workers.

What comes back is the interesting part. The project reports that eight-year-old coffee plots hold 82 species of birds, spiders and butterflies, share about 60 percent of their species with natural forest, and are used by the endemic Gorongosa horseshoe bat. Trade press repeats these figures from park research, and one account narrows the 82 to bird species, so treat them as early findings from one study rather than settled counts.

From cherry to bag

Each of the three growing areas has a wet mill, and the project also runs a dry mill, a cupping lab and a roastery. About 90 percent of the cherry is processed fully washed, with natural, honey and anaerobic lots as experiments, and the volume is over 40 tons of green coffee a year. Colonna Coffee, a UK roaster that has bought from the project for more than five years, sells an eco-pulped natural that it says cups like a washed coffee. The coffee is marketed by Produtos Naturais da Gorongosa, a for-profit company founded in 2019 that says it puts all of its profit back into the park's restoration work.

What the cup is like

Two roasters describe the single-origin coffee in similar terms. Our Gorongosa's first single-origin release, a medium roast announced in 2021, was described as walnuts, toast and Meyer lemon. Colonna calls its Gorongosa sweet and balanced with soft citrus acidity, and compares it to good Costa Rican coffee. It is a gentle cup, and the sweetness is the part to look for.

Read the label, though. The 2021 release was announced as the first coffee made entirely from Mozambican beans, which means the signature blends were not all Mozambican; a retail listing for the medium-roast blend Girls Run the World names Mozambique, Brazil and Peru. Notes such as stone fruit and praline, or pink grapefruit and toasted almond, come from listings for the brand's roast-level blends, which can include coffee from other countries, so they say little about the mountain's coffee on its own.

Brewing it

The recipe here is an AeroPress at 93°C. A paper-filtered cup keeps a soft citrus acidity clear, and a short immersion does not give a delicate coffee time to turn bitter. If it tastes sour, grind a little finer or steep a little longer; if it tastes dry or bitter, go coarser or shorter. Because the cup is sweet rather than loud, let it cool a few minutes before you judge it.

Reading the Flavor Profile

These values are comparative editorial positions within our own catalog, calibrated so entries can be ranked against each other. They are not laboratory measurements.