Field Note - Sourcing Coffee In Sri Lanka's Hill Country - Blackpool Coffee Bungalow

October 10, 2026

Three hours uphill from the coast, at the top of a road the British built for coffee, one family is growing it again. A day at Blackpool Coffee Bungalow, Nuwara Eliya, with Asitha Jayasinghe.

Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka · August 2026 · Read it below, or watch the film (28 min)

Chapter one

The drive up

You start in the tropics. Heat, palms, the coast road out of Colombo with the sea on your right. Three hours later you're at six thousand feet in fog and eucalyptus with the windows up, wondering what country you're in.

The road climbs through Kandy, then Gampola, then Pussellawa, and somewhere after the tunnels the tea starts. It doesn't stop. Labookellie's name is written on the hillside in white letters you can read from the car. By the time you reach Nuwara Eliya the rain is sideways and the town looks like something airlifted from the Scottish Highlands: red roofs, a half-timbered hotel, a lake with mist on it.

Tea slopes at Labookellie in mist, the estate name written in white on the hill — Labookellie, on the climb to Nuwara Eliya. The estate's name is set into the slope.

That look is not an accident. The British built it that way on purpose, and the reason they built anything up here at all was coffee. That elevation is the whole point. It's why the coffee up here is worth the drive.

Colombo to Nuwara Eliya: 190 km and 1,868 m of climb. The coffee we tasted was grown at 1,380 m.

Chapter two

The place

We had dinner at the Grand Hotel the night before. Nice old pile. Nobody told us whose house it used to be.

The Grand Hotel, Nuwara Eliya, in fog, seen over corrugated roofs — The Grand Hotel, Nuwara Eliya. It began as the holiday home of Sir Edward Barnes, the governor who brought coffee up the mountain.

Asitha told us the next morning. The Grand Hotel was the first building in Nuwara Eliya, and it was the holiday home of Sir Edward Barnes, the fifth British governor of Ceylon. Barnes had worked with coffee farmers in India before he arrived. When London handed him the whole island and told him to build an economy on it, coffee was his project. He took the plants the Dutch had left behind, ran a trial on his own land next to the botanical garden at Kandy, and gave the order that changed the map: go to the highest place possible, and replant.

Portrait of Lieutenant-General Sir Edward Barnes in red uniform — Lt-Gen Sir Edward Barnes (1776–1838), governor of Ceylon 1824–31. Public domain.

A train on the Colombo to Kandy railway passing a cliff at Sensation Rock, about 1880 — The Colombo–Kandy line at Sensation Rock, c.1880. Rijksmuseum, CC0.

The railway we travelled was built to transport coffee from the highlands to the mainland. Many infrastructure, even the labour laws in this country, was made based on the coffee industry.Asitha Jayasinghe

The road we drove up. The railway beside it. The town at the top. All of it was built for coffee. And then, for a hundred and fifty years, there wasn't any.

Chapter three

Coffee, as Asitha tells it

He gave us hours. This is some of it.

Asitha's museum is one room of his house, and he tells the whole history of coffee standing in the middle of it, from memory, pointing at the walls. He starts in Ethiopia with Kaldi, the goatherd whose goats wouldn't sleep, and is careful to say what he can't prove: everything before the sixteenth century is a story. The written history begins in Yemen. A plant crossed the Red Sea. The Arabs called it qahwa, the rest of the world called it the wine of Araby, and the port it shipped from gave the drink a name we still use.

Engraving of Kaldi and his dancing goats — Kaldi and his goats. Ukers, *All About Coffee*, 1922.

Engraving of the city of Mocha from the sea, about 1680 — Mocha, Yemen, c.1680, where the first coffee trade happened. Olfert Dapper. Public domain.

Map showing coffee routes from Mocha to Cairo, Constantinople, Venice, London and Amsterdam — Mocha sells to the world, 1500s–1600s.

Sri Lanka's part begins before any of the Europeans. Asitha's reading is that Arab traders brought coffee here before 1505, not as a drink but as a flowering plant, because people on the island wanted a fragrant flower to offer at the temple. When the Portuguese arrived they recorded locals offering coffee blossom and cooking the leaves in curry. The Dutch brought it as coffee in 1658 and planted it near the coast, where arabica grows well and bears almost nothing. Then the British came, went uphill, and from 1824 the island was planted end to end.

Ceylon coffee at its peak

Area under coffee: 111,000 hectares
Exports: over 50,000 tons a year
Rank: second in the world, after Brazil
Value, 1849–1869: £30,594,397, read off the ledger framed on Asitha's wall

Workers picking coffee among bushes on a Ceylon estate, 1903 — Picking coffee at Dambatenne, Ceylon, 1903. One of the few photographs of Ceylon coffee that exist. Underwood & Underwood. Library of Congress, no known restrictions.

In 1869 a fungus arrived on the wind. Coffee rust. Every plantation on the island died over the following decade. A planter named James Taylor was sent to India to learn tea and came back with plants; another was sent to South America for rubber. The estates kept their names and changed their crops. The maps in Asitha's museum show it happening: the 1860s map is all coffee, the 1893 map is coffee, tea and cocoa, and the map after that has no coffee on it.

Drawing of coffee leaf rust under the microscope — Coffee-leaf disease under the microscope. Ukers, 1922.

Portrait of James Taylor, tea planter — James Taylor of Loolecondera, who planted the first commercial tea in 1867. Public domain.

An 1870s map of the coffee estates of the central province, framed on the museum wall — Principal coffee estates of the hill country at the peak, 1870s, on the museum wall. The red dot is where we were standing.

These plantations still exist with the same names. They are all tea, rubber, cocoa. But now again, tea planters here are coming back to coffee.Asitha Jayasinghe

Chapter four

Asitha and the bungalow

Blackpool Coffee Bungalow: a small white bungalow with a red door, wooden stools in the yard, a chalkboard sign — Blackpool Coffee Bungalow, No. 105, Blackpool, Nuwara Eliya. You'd miss it if you were driving too fast.

This is Asitha. He's an aircraft engineer. The pandemic grounded him, and he came home to the hills with time on his hands and a habit of reading everything about one subject until there was nothing left to read. The subject was coffee. He built a museum inside his own house so he'd have somewhere to put what he'd learned.

The garden was his grandfather Oliver's. Oliver planted coffee here just after independence, when everyone said it wouldn't grow this high. Blackpool still describes itself as the highest-altitude coffee grower in Sri Lanka, and the blends carry the family names: Oliver's Recipe, and Barnes Special, for the governor who put coffee up here in the first place.

A coffee seedling held in a hand in the garden — A seedling in the garden. Blackpool Coffee.

Inside the Blackpool coffee shop: a stone wall, an espresso machine, shelves of cups — The coffee shop. Blackpool Coffee.

His company is called Coffee Exploration Technologies. CoffeeX, for short. The pitch is simple and a little audacious: a grade of coffee beyond specialty. Single farm. Single origin. Every stage, growing, processing, roasting, brewing, studied, written down, and traceable back to one farm.

He grows coffee here, but the garden isn't really a farm. It's a classroom. Dozens of local growers bring him their cherries, and he brings them here to show them what right looks like, and what wrong looks like. He keeps a twenty-five-year-old tree that was planted badly on purpose, its roots bent, stunted like a bonsai next to its healthy twin, so his farmers can see the difference. He keeps another tree that nobody picks: it belongs to the squirrels and the birds, and because they have it, they leave the rest alone.

A hand-painted signpost in the garden reading Coffee Blooms, Trees Whisper, Nature's Embrace, Sweet Start — The garden signpost.

This plant is special to us. We don't pick coffee from this. We keep it for the animals.Asitha Jayasinghe

We haven't met anyone who knows Sri Lankan coffee better, or who's more stubborn about quality. He also won't let you leave without eating something off a tree.

The Blackpool coffee shop lit up at 4 AM in thick fog, a horse walking past on the road — The coffee shop at four in the morning. Their line, not ours: *we make our own mist.* Blackpool Coffee.

Chapter five

Why elevation

So why drive three hours uphill for a coffee?

Asitha explains altitude the way an engineer would, because he is one. At eight thousand feet in an aircraft you can't breathe: the oxygen is there, but the pressure isn't enough to get it into you. A plant feels the same thin air. Up here the cherry ripens slowly. The low country picks in November. Nuwara Eliya picks in February and March. In those extra months, he says, the tree puts more into each bean, and the bean comes out denser: a hundred grams that takes a hundred beans from the low country takes far fewer from here.

Chart comparing the low-country coffee harvest in November with the Nuwara Eliya harvest in February and March — The cherry takes longer up here. About two months longer.

A denser bean keeps longer after roasting, and it's why high-grown, shade-grown coffee earns what it does on the world market. It's also why the same brew recipe behaves differently in Colombo. The water is heavier here.

Green coffee cherries on the branch, held in a hand — Green cherries in August. Red next February.

Chapter six

The cup

Then he made us one.

He names the coffee the way you'd name a wine. Grown at 1,380 metres on a single farm, a hundred acres that is one quarter coffee and three quarters tea. Arabica, sub-variety S9. Natural process. Roasted eleven days earlier, because for pour-over he rests a small batch for nine days and uses it between nine and fifteen. Freshness, he says, is a rubber band: it stretches for nine days, holds flat until fifteen, then goes.

Stacked clear jars of green and roasted coffee beans beside a Blackpool Coffee Bungalow pouch — Graded beans in the tasting room, and the bag it ends up in.

When it comes to flavors and aromas of coffee, it's like music. Coffee also has notes. The base note is set while the flower is blooming on the tree. Everything else is made after picking: the way we process, the way we dry, the way we roast, even the water we add.Asitha Jayasinghe

He brews a V60 the way a proper high tea is served, course by course, in small cups so your palate resets between them: just like smelling perfume, he says, you need something to clear your nose before the next one. Water between ninety and ninety-two degrees. The first pour rinses the paper, because paper has flavors. Fifteen grams of coffee to three hundred of water, in three pours, with a pause to let the bloom breathe.

A latte with leaf pattern beside a Ceylon passport on a wooden table — Blackpool Coffee.

Pouring milk into a cup at the espresso machine — Blackpool Coffee.

His notes for this lot: black tea as the base, wild herbs, a hint of chrysanthemum. Ours: bright and clean, some spice, and a floral note we'd swear came off the flowers in the garden. The science won't back that claim up. The garden was right there.

Day eleven. He counted. That's what separates a real micro-lot from a bag with a good label.

This is what sourcing actually looks like: long drives, cherries in your hand, and someone who'd rather teach you than sell you.

An open palm holding a split red coffee cherry and its two pale seeds — A cherry opened in the garden: one good bean and one float.

Sri Lankan micro-lots, landed in the U.S. with the grower's name still attached. His is Asitha.

Credits and sources

Filmed at Blackpool Coffee Bungalow, Nuwara Eliya, 28–29 August 2026, with Asitha Jayasinghe. Photographs of the coffee shop, the seedling, the latte and the cup are Blackpool Coffee's own, used with permission.
Historical images: Underwood & Underwood stereographs, 1903–06, Library of Congress (no known restrictions); plates from W. H. Ukers, All About Coffee, 1922 (public domain); Olfert Dapper's view of Mocha, c.1680 (public domain); the Colombo–Kandy line at Sensation Rock, c.1880, Rijksmuseum (CC0); portraits of Sir Edward Barnes and James Taylor (public domain).
Maps and charts drawn by Serendip Soul from Natural Earth data (public domain). Elevation and harvest figures as told by Asitha; the ledger figure as framed in the Ceylon Coffee Museum.

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