beverage upon beverage upon beverage: Good African Rukoki Gold

Available from Tesco at around £2.50, this is a light to medium bodied coffee with a playful citric acidity. There are fruity notes entwined with light, warm, damp, roasted coffee. There's a pleasant earthiness grounding the flavours, but mostly this is a coffee that reaches for the middle to higher notes in a subtle and not always successful manner. It's a drinkable coffee, and pleasingly light and interesting - perhaps something you'd have mid day rather than in the morning or after dinner, when you might want something a bit more obvious and heavy in the flavour department. It's not really my sort of coffee, though it does hold off on being objectionably acidic. It's a coffee I respect for being decent, and I love the story of the Good Africa Coffee company, but it's not one that I am likely to buy again. Indeed, when looking for information on the brand and the coffee region, I find there's little information beyond the company's "Trade not Aid" story, and how Ugandan entrepreneur Andrew Rugasira set the company up in 2003 to help his fellow Ugandans, and how the brand has become globally successful. I almost exclusively buy fair trade coffees, and there are plenty of them these days (fair trade coffee is more successful than fair trade bananas) so I am looking for a little more than a coffee being fair trade when I buy it. I want to support fair trade, but I also want a flavoursome coffee. The story with Good Africa Coffee appears to be more about the fair trade than the coffee flavour.

Over 80% of coffee grown in Uganda is Robusta, grown on the lowlands. Good tasting Arabica coffee can only be grown at high altitude in Uganda, such as Mount Elgon in the east and Mount Rwenzori and Mount Muhabura in the south west, and the harvests are vulnerable to climate change. The coffee is grown in Rukoki in the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda - a region that has been dependent on coffee growing for a long time. The mountains are also known informally as the Mountains of the Moon. Initial searches for coffee in the Rwenzori Mountains will return stories about the Good African Coffee company, but there are other coffee traders who buy and sell coffee grown on the Rwenzori Mountains, such as Taste of Africa, Falcon, Green Mountain,

Score: 4

**************

http://www.goodafrican.com/index.php/our-story.html

"This medium dark roast coffee is exciting, strong, yet smooth with hints of fruity overtones.

Rukoki is a region high up on the slopes of the Rwenzori Mountains in Western Uganda where the moist, cool climate enables farmers to produce distinctive Arabica coffees."

"This coffee is well known to have rich heavy body, light acidity and well balanced dark chocolate flavors. It is a great ideal coffee for a hard day's work"