One year on
the mountain

It begins in the rain

The story starts in a nursery bed under the monsoon — seeds from the best trees of the last harvest, pressed into forest soil and shaded with cut grass. The rains that flood the valleys are life up here: young seedlings drink for months, growing slower than lowland coffee ever would, hardening for mountain life.

When a seedling is a year old and strong enough, a farmer carries it up the terrace on foot — there is no road to most plots — and plants it in the shade of utis and chilaune trees, where it will live for decades.

The hills turn white for a week

After the first spring rains, the coffee trees do something briefly magnificent: they bloom. For a handful of days the terraces are covered in small white blossoms that smell of jasmine — and every blossom is a promise of exactly one cherry.

Then the petals fall, tiny green pinheads appear, and the longest wait in coffee begins: eight to nine months from flower to ripe fruit. At 1,350 meters, in cool air, nothing about this can be rushed — and that slowness is where the sweetness comes from.

The slow ripening

Through the second monsoon and into the clear autumn, the cherries swell and darken — green, then yellow, then red. The farmers' work never pauses: compost carried up the terraces basket by basket, shade trees pruned so light falls just right, grass cut by hand between the rows.

No synthetic sprays touch these plots. Pest and disease are managed the old way — shade, spacing, biodiversity, and a farmer's daily walk through the trees, reading the leaves the way others read weather.

The harvest, cherry by cherry

Harvest arrives with the cold, clear months — and it arrives one cherry at a time. No machine can climb a Lalitpur terrace, and no machine can tell deep red from almost-ready. So families pick by hand, pass after pass through the same trees, weeks apart, taking only fruit at its peak.

A skilled picker gathers perhaps 50 kilograms of cherry in a long day — which, after washing and drying, becomes barely 8 kilograms of green coffee. Every bag we sell holds days of someone's careful hands.

The same day it's picked, the cherry goes to water: fully washed, fermented clean, rinsed in mountain water, then laid on raised beds to dry slowly in winter sun — turned by hand, morning and evening, for weeks.

From the Himalaya to your kitchen

Dried, rested, and milled, the green beans are sealed in GrainPro-lined jute to protect them across the world — down from the hills, out of Kathmandu, across the ocean to our warehouse in Dallas–Fort Worth.

There we roast in small batches: light, to keep the mountain's florals — apricot, honey, white tea — or medium, where the sweetness turns to caramel and dark cherry. Days later, it's in your cup.

One lot. 200 kilograms. A full year of mountain seasons and family labor — poured in about three minutes. Drink it slowly.