Uganda | Sironko Station | Nyasaland/SL14/SL28 Natural | Signature Series
Upcoming Roast / 160g
$55.00 AUD
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Uganda | Sironko Station | Nyasaland/SL14/SL28 Natural | Signature Series
$55.00 AUD
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80 Somersby Falls RD, Somersby NSW
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This coffee’s roasted in our filter style — meaning it’s designed to shine as black coffee rather than with milk. That doesn’t mean you have to brew it as a pour-over though. You can make it however you like — espresso, moka pot, AeroPress or anything in between. We simply roast it a little lighter to highlight the bean’s origin flavours giving you a cup that’s clean, vibrant and full of clarity.
Lighter roasting keeps more of the natural acidity and sweetness intact which makes for a beautifully expressive black coffee. This coffee is best enjoyed without milk as it’s too acidic and the flavours don’t pair well once milk is added.
If you prefer your milk coffee with richer caramel, toffee or nutty flavours you might enjoy our espresso range more. Those roasts are taken a little darker to bring out deeper sweetness and balance beautifully with milk.
Origin and Sourcing
Varietal:
Nyasaland, SL14, SL28
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Nyasaland is one of the great survivors of African coffee. It traces back to Typica seed carried from Jamaica to Malawi — then the British protectorate of Nyasaland — in 1878, and from there to Uganda around 1910. On the slopes of Mount Elgon it took root so thoroughly that Ugandans stopped calling it Nyasaland altogether and simply called it Bugisu, after the region and the people who grew it. Malawi has largely given the variety up; Uganda's smallholders never did.
By every agronomic measure it is a difficult plant to love. Nyasaland is tall and awkward to harvest, yields medium to low, and has no meaningful resistance to either coffee leaf rust or coffee berry disease. For decades growers have been offered free, high-yielding, disease-tolerant hybrids to replace it, and many of the oldest surviving trees on Elgon date to the 1940s — saved by farmers who simply refused to pull them out, including through the Amin years when a great many were destroyed.
What that stubbornness buys is aromatics. Nyasaland beans run smaller than the hybrids, but they carry a floral intensity — jasmine, orange blossom, sometimes a soft almond note — that the replacement varieties do not produce. It is frequently interplanted with SL14 and SL28 on Mount Elgon, where it supplies the perfume over the Kenyan selections' structure and acidity.
SL14 is a classic East African variety developed by Scott Agricultural Laboratories in Kenya during the 1930s and now widely grown across Uganda’s highlands. Selected from a drought-resistant Typica lineage, it’s known for its resilience in variable climates and its ability to thrive in rich volcanic soils at medium to high altitudes. Though tall in stature and requiring careful pruning, SL14 rewards attentive growers with consistently high-quality cherries that form the backbone of many of Uganda’s finest specialty coffees.
In the cup, SL14 delivers a beautifully balanced profile—bright yet smooth—with notes that often lean toward chocolate, red berries, and stone fruit, depending on the region and processing method. Whether washed or naturally processed, it’s admired for its clarity and sweetness, often paired with its sibling SL28 to add depth and structure. When grown in regions like Mount Elgon or the Rwenzoris, SL14 showcases the best of Ugandan terroir: vibrant fruit, gentle acidity, and a lingering cocoa finish that makes it a standout in both espresso and filter roasts.
Developed by Scott Agricultural Laboratories in Kenya, SL28 is known for its excellent drought resistance and stunning cup quality. It exhibits bright, winey acidity with notes of blackcurrant and citrus. SL28 is one of the reasons Kenyan coffees are so revered. However, it’s highly susceptible to leaf rust and pests.
Processing Method:
Natural
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The natural process involves drying whole coffee cherries under the sun, allowing the beans to absorb flavors from the fruit as they dry. This results in a coffee with a heavy body, fruity sweetness, and complex flavors. It’s commonly practiced in Ethiopia and Brazil, where the climate is conducive to sun-drying.
Farm:
Sironko Station
Region / Area:
Mount Elgon, Sironko
Altitude:
2000–2200 MASL
Sourcing Partner:
Mountain Harvest
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Mountain Harvest is a Ugandan specialty coffee exporter based in Mbale, at the foot of Mount Elgon. Working directly with smallholder communities across the mountain's slopes, they run Sironko Station as a research and processing hub, and host the annual Paradigm Shift auction through which their standout microlots are sold direct to roasters worldwide.Roast Details
Roast Style:
Filter
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Filter roasts are lighter with a shorter development time, designed to highlight clarity, acidity, and fruit-driven complexity — perfect for black coffee and filter methods. These roasts can also be used for espresso, especially if you enjoy brighter, more vibrant shots. Try longer brew ratios or turbo shots to tame acidity and bring out sweetness. Espresso roasts, on the other hand, are developed further to encourage deeper caramelization and Maillard reactions, producing richer, chocolatey, and nutty flavours that shine in milk and offer a fuller-bodied espresso.
We don't usually roast omni (one roast for all brew methods) — in our experience, it tends to be a compromise that's average at both. But occasionally, for larger lots or versatile blends, we may do an omni roast to suit both black and milk drinkers.
Roasted On Machine:
Roest L100 Ultra
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The ROEST L100 Ultra is the most advanced sample roaster in its class, combining the precision of the L100 Plus with next-generation hardware upgrades and new airflow technology. A redesigned, fully perforated drum with reversible rotation introduces a counterflow mode that channels air directly through the bean mass—allowing faster, more efficient heat transfer and enabling lighter roasts or second crack in under 90 seconds. With upgraded 5 GHz Wi-Fi, a faster processor, built-in pressure sensor, and refreshed UI matching the P3000, the Ultra offers better batch consistency (even at 50g), improved airflow calibration, and lower energy consumption. It’s a serious tool for roasters wanting unmatched control, speed, and repeatability—while still fitting neatly on the benchtop.
Taste Profile
Tasting Notes:
Pineapple, chocolate, orange blossom, raisins
Suitable with Milk?
No
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Some of our light roasted filter coffees are bursting with bright, fruity acidity — think citrus, berries, or tropical notes. While these flavours shine on their own, they don't always play well with milk. The acidity can clash with milk's natural sweetness and creaminess, sometimes creating sour or chalky flavours.
Decaffeinated?
No
Import into Beanconqueror
Uganda | Sironko Station | Nyasaland/SL14/SL28 Natural | Signature Series - When is peak flavour?
Medium Roast - Roasted on Roest L100 Ultra
One bag. Twenty-five kilos. Seventy-four bids. This is the lot we chased through Mountain Harvest's Paradigm Shift auction and brought home to the Central Coast — a pure natural from Sironko Station on the Ugandan flank of Mount Elgon, grown between 2,000 and 2,200 metres and dried without a drop of fermentation water. It cups the way the altitude promises: pineapple and orange blossom up top, raisin and cocoa underneath, and a clarity that most naturals never find.
Sironko Station
Sironko Station is Mountain Harvest's research hub — the place where the company works out what Mount Elgon coffee is actually capable of before rolling those methods out across its wider network. It sits in Sironko district in eastern Uganda, close enough to the mountain that cherry can come down from communities at the very edge of the growing belt and still arrive on the drying beds the same day.
What makes the station unusual is the degree of control. Cherry is refractometer-tested on delivery and only accepted at 18° Brix and above, which is a demanding threshold — it rules out anything underripe before it ever reaches a bed. Accepted cherry then goes straight onto raised beds whole, with no fermentation step at all. This is the "pure natural" in the lot's name: no water, no tank time, no yeast, nothing but fruit and air.
Drying is the hard part, and it is where most naturals come undone. The station's teams turn and monitor the beds continuously, bringing the cherry down to roughly 10% moisture at a pace slow enough to avoid the ferment-y, alcoholic notes that plague rushed naturals and fast enough to avoid mould. The result is a cup with the fruit intensity you expect from a natural but with edges that stay defined rather than blurring into jam.
Mount Elgon, Eastern Uganda
Mount Elgon is an extinct volcano straddling the Uganda–Kenya border, and its Ugandan slopes carry some of the highest arabica in East Africa. The cherry in this lot came from the Yilwanako (Mayiyi) and Buginyanya communities on the northern side — remote smallholdings where coffee grows amongst bananas, beans and shade trees on volcanic soil that has been weathering for millions of years.
At 2,000–2,200 metres the nights are cold and the cherry ripens slowly. That slow maturation is what concentrates sugar and acidity in the seed, and it is the reason a coffee from this altitude can carry a stone-fruit sweetness through a natural process without turning muddy. Smallholders here typically farm well under a hectare each, so a 25 kg lot like this one represents the picking of a handful of families over a matter of days.
About the Nyasaland Coffee Variety
Nyasaland is one of the great survivors of African coffee. It traces back to Typica seed carried from Jamaica to Malawi — then the British protectorate of Nyasaland — in 1878, and from there to Uganda around 1910. On Mount Elgon it took root so thoroughly that Ugandans stopped calling it Nyasaland at all and simply called it Bugisu, after the region and the people who grew it. Malawi has largely given the variety up; Uganda's smallholders never did.
Growers keep it for the cup, because by every agronomic measure it is a difficult plant to love. Nyasaland is tall, awkward to harvest, yields medium-to-low, and has no meaningful resistance to either coffee leaf rust or coffee berry disease. For decades farmers have been offered free, high-yielding, disease-tolerant hybrids to replace it. Many of the oldest surviving trees on Elgon date to the 1940s and were saved by growers who refused to pull them out — including through the Amin years, when a great many were destroyed.
What that stubbornness buys is aromatics. Nyasaland beans run smaller than the hybrids, but they carry a floral intensity — jasmine, orange blossom, sometimes a soft almond note — that the replacement varieties simply do not produce. In this lot it shows as the orange blossom lift that sits over the pineapple, and it is blended here with SL-14 and SL-28, two Kenyan selections bred for drought tolerance and cup quality respectively. The SL-28 contributes the blackcurrant-adjacent structure and the acidity backbone; the Nyasaland supplies the perfume; the natural process ties them together with raisin and cocoa.
In the cup
Pineapple, chocolate, orange blossom and raisins. Roasted for filter. It is sweet and layered enough to reward a careful pourover, and it will take a slightly coarser grind and a gentler pour than you might expect — the fruit arrives on its own without being chased.