20/09/2026
Thank You very much. See you soon. 😃☕️❤️
You leave the lowlands in the heat. Palms, humidity, the air heavy enough to lean on.
Then the road starts climbing, and somewhere on the switchbacks above the tea slopes the island changes on you. The temperature drops. Mist comes down into the road. Eucalyptus replaces palm. By the time you reach Nuwara Eliya you could swear someone lifted you out of the tropics and set you down in the Scottish Highlands, which is more or less what the British were going for when they built it.
That's where we found Blackpool Coffee Bungalow. Small white house, chalkboard out front, garden growing up around it. Tucked away that even though you know it should be there, if you are not careful, you might miss it.
Inside is Asitha. Before the pandemic, he was an aircraft engineer. When the planes stopped flying he went all the way into coffee. He built a museum that tells the history of coffee in Sri Lanka unlike anywhere else can.
He spent the afternoon walking us through Sri Lankan coffee. Not his coffee. The island's. The trees that came before the tea. The blight of the 1870s. The families who kept growing it anyway, quietly, for generations, after the world stopped calling this a coffee country.
Then he opened his hand and showed us the cherries — red, green, and the two pale seeds inside. The thing everyone downstream of this hill forgets is a fruit.
We've met a lot of people who sell coffee. Not many who know it like this.
There's a much longer story here than a caption holds. We're going back for it.
More soon — including what it will take to bring Sri Lankan specialty micro-lots to the U.S. That work starts here, with them.
📍 Blackpool, Nuwara Eliya
☕
Blackpool Coffee
Follow along. We're documenting all of it.
