St Andrew: Blue Mountain Coffee Above Kingston

St Andrew is where Jamaica's coffee industry began, and it remains the parish most closely tied to Blue Mountain coffee today. Coffee reached the island here in 1728, and the parish's mountain villages, Irish Town, Newcastle, Gordon Town and Mavis Bank among them, still farm the crop above Kingston.

Where does Blue Mountain coffee grow in St Andrew?

JACRA names St Andrew, with St Thomas and Portland, as one of the three parishes that make up the legally defined Blue Mountain coffee area, and it is the parish closest to Kingston. The Jamaica Information Service's parish profile gives St Andrew's total area as 434.5 square kilometers, stretching from the Liguanea Plains around Half-Way Tree, the parish capital, up into the mountains, where it records Sir John's Peak at 1,930 meters. Coffee country begins where the plains give way to foothills, in villages such as Irish Town and Gordon Town, and continues up through Mavis Bank toward the high ridge shared with St Thomas.

Temple Hall and the birthplace of Jamaican coffee

St Andrew's link to coffee predates the Blue Mountain industry by decades. Wikipedia's entry on Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee dates the crop's introduction to the island to 1728, and the Jamaica Gleaner's history of the industry attributes the planting to Governor Sir Nicholas Lawes, at Temple Hall, his property in St Andrew. Cultivation spread from there through St Andrew's foothills over the following decades before moving higher into the mountains and into other parishes. St Andrew's closeness to Kingston made it a natural starting point: the city was already the island's commercial center, and the parish's foothills offered plantation owners cooler ground within a short ride of the port and the markets it served. That history, and the fuller timeline that follows it, is covered on a history of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee and Sir Nicholas Lawes and Jamaica's first coffee.

St Andrew's coffee villages and estates

More named coffee properties are documented in St Andrew than in either of the other two Blue Mountain parishes, reflecting both its proximity to Kingston and its long farming history. Irish Town is home to Craighton Estate, owned by the Japanese company UCC since 1981; Newcastle, a former British hill station, sits near Clifton Mount Estate on the eastern slope of Catherine's Peak; and Mavis Bank gives its name to the Mavis Bank Coffee Factory, founded in 1923 and still trading as JABLUM. Gordon Town, on a separate road from Kingston, functions as a gateway to this same coffee country rather than a farming site itself. Further into the hills, Clydesdale traces its coffee back to the late 1700s, Flamstead has grown coffee since at least 1764 according to its distributor, and Sir John's Peak Estate farms Geisha coffee on land that reaches into neighboring Portland. Fuller profiles of these and other properties are in the site's estates directory.

Newcastle and the coffee festival

Newcastle, already known as a coffee-plantation-turned-military-base, has also become a fixture of St Andrew's coffee calendar. The Jamaica Information Service reported that the sixth annual Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee Festival was held in Newcastle in March 2023, preceded by a farmers' trade day organized by RADA and JACRA for growers from Portland, St Andrew and St Thomas at UTech Jamaica. A fuller account of the festival is on the Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee Festival. Holding both events in St Andrew, rather than in St Thomas or Portland, follows naturally from the parish's position: it is the most accessible of the three coffee parishes from Kingston, and Newcastle in particular already draws visitors for its views and its own history as a former hill station, described on its own page.

Recent support and recovery

St Andrew's coffee farmers have received targeted government support in recent years. A Jamaica Information Service report on a May 2025 supply handover at Resource Square in Cinchona, St Andrew, recorded $32 million in fertilizer, seedlings and other inputs distributed to coffee farmers under the Crop Restoration and Expansion Program, with JACRA's director general also encouraging farmers toward value-added products such as coffee-based cosmetics. An earlier report on bush-fire damage named Flamstead and the Tower Hill/Lime Tree communities of St Andrew as sites of a subsequent tree-planting exercise. Most recently, a 2026 Jamaica Information Service report described a $132 million rehabilitation program following Hurricane Melissa, covering St Andrew alongside St Thomas and Portland, part of a recovery that brought the industry's 2025 output to 145,000 boxes of Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee.