For lovers of a good coffee, something new is brewing on the South Coast, writes Shirley le Guern.
With just 700 hectares under coffee, South Africa is not officially a coffee-growing country but, with the success of at least three speciality coffee farms in KZN, a new niche is evolving for those who appreciate a quality brew. One is Mpenjati near Munster on the South Coast, which harvested its first beans under the watchful eye of founder, Des Wichmann, in 2019.
Since that first harvest of around 300kg – enough to supply a single cafe for just a year – Wichmann has planted 55 hectares with different coffee varietals from as far afield as Colombia, Costa Rica and Kenya. He expects around four tons this harvest.
To make his already proudly South African coffee even more local, he recently sourced Racemosa trees. Seen as a “wild” coffee, they originate from Hluhluwe. The small, black beans are high in sugars which improves the quality of the final product.
Wichmann says Mpenjati Coffee started with a dream. He grew up in the region and farmed everything from livestock to sugar and bananas before travelling overseas. On his return, he realised that the low sugar price no longer made farming this iconic KZN crop viable.
“I diversified into vegetables and mushrooms and even peppadews, trying to find a niche market. Eventually I settled on coffee which you can sell and market on your own.”
The KZN South Coast is ideally suited to growing coffee. Although it does not have the high altitudes enjoyed by other African coffee growers such as Kenya, Tanzania and Ethiopia, it does have the rich, slightly acidic soil, high humidity, good drainage and ideal coastal winds.
“I have sent coffee to some companies who have cupped it and scored it, and we immediately went into the speciality coffee category.”
The beauty of coffee, says Wichmann, is that it doesn’t take long to see results. “Within 12 months, we had flowering trees. Eighteen months later, we were picking and, by year two, the trees had doubled in size and were flowering nicely.”
But it hasn’t been easy. Mpenjati grew from its initial harvest of 300kg of green beans to 1,7 tons in 2020. But, in 2021, a leaf miner attack led to the loss of many trees and the harvest shrunk to just 500kg. But Mpenjati quickly recovered.
Coffee is highly labour intensive. The cherries must be handpicked at exactly the right time. As all do not ripen simultaneously, they have to be carefully selected with the greener ones left to develop. This has meant training harvesters and adding staff over the years.
Mpenjati has also become a family business with his wife Leigh managing the cafe and coffee shop, plus coffee tours and tastings.
This agri-tourism venture enables visitors to explore the countryside, tasting the raw red beans that cluster on the stems of the coffee trees, and then following the coffee process from washing, drying and fermenting the beans on sun beds, to sorting and roasting them and, finally, enjoying a cappuccino.
Although Mpenjati is one South Africa’s larger coffee farms, Wichmann is focused on speciality coffees.
“We understand the terroir to produce outstanding premium single-origin coffee. For generations, we’ve been farming in KZN, but I’ve still had to do things the hard way. So, I’m looking and learning all the time – that’s school fees, I guess,” he shrugs.
Half of Mpenjati’s coffee goes to its home branded coffees and coffee shop and the remainder is sold to independent coffee shops and roasteries.