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We are so thrilled to be entering into African coffee season! Kenya is always an origin we look forward to buying coffees from. Every year, our selections remind us why we love Kenyan coffees so much: expressive, distinctive, and bright. This year, we were fortunate to purchase a natural processed lot from Kiawamaruru Factory. Natural processed coffees from Kenya are rare to come by, as washed processing dominates most of the Kenyan coffee market.
This coffee is from the Nyeri region. The name of the Factory means “Place of The Mururu Shrubs”. Mururu are medicinal plants that once grew abundantly where the Factory is located; they required fertile soil to thrive and soon, this region became known as place where farming made sense. Coffee here is grown by smallholder farmers on plots of land less than a hectare small. Farmers bring their coffee cherries to the Factory for processing. In Kenya, natural processing has a bad reputation; the remnants of the harvest are thrown onto drying beds and sold as low quality coffees locally. But this coffee challenges this reputation. The Factory has chosen to process only deep red cherries, hand-picked and ripened for at least 8 days, then hand-sorted and floated to remove low-density coffees. The cherries then undergo fermentation in bags for a controlled time, and turned regularly for even fermentation. They are then dried on raised African beds then milled.
The result is an intensely sweet and fruit-driven coffee. The purple and red fresh fruit characteristics typical of washed coffees from Nyeri turn into ripe and cooked purple grape and berries in the cup. This coffee stood out on our selection table early this year, and we couldn’t be happier with how the coffee turned out upon arrival.
