Kenya Nyeri Gura Peaberry

This delicious peaberry offering from the Othaya Farmer's Cooperative Society is tangy and sweet with a medium to full body and silky texture. Notes of grapefruit, caramel, brown sugar and raisin followed by a dry finish that is characteristically Kenyan.

Arrival Date: October 9th, 2020

Acidity & Brightness: Tangy front end balanced by sweetness

Balance & Finish: Great balance, dry, finish 

Body & Texture: Medium to full bodied, silky texture

Flavors: Grapefruit, caramel, brown sugar, raisin

Grade: Peaberry

Processing: Fully Washed, shade grown, hand picked, sun dried on raised tables

Varietals: SL28, SL34, Ruiru 11, and Batian

Roasting:  Start with a City + (Light-medium) and feel free to try Full City (Medium). Kenyan coffees are famous for their crisp acidity and dark roasting will mute that. However, if you prefer, this coffee may be carried into a Full City Plus and still retain a lot of body and most of it's brightness. This coffee roasts very evenly.

Reminder: This Coffee is raw, you must roast it before brewing

Our Review: Kenya’s coffee is dominated by a cooperative system of production, whose members vote on representation, marketing and milling contracts for their coffee, as well as profit allocation. Othaya Farmers Cooperative Society, the umbrella organization that includes Gura Factory, is one of Kenya’s larger societies, with 19 different factories and more than 14,000 farmer members across the southern Nyeri region. Othaya Farmer Cooperative Society is one of key member societies of the Kenya Cooperative Coffee Exporters (KCCE) organization. KCCE is an historic organization of almost 4,000 individual cooperatives. The group was formed in 2009, with the express goal of managing marketing and exporting operations internally and cooperatively, as opposed to contractually with third parties. The economics of smallholder systems are consistently difficult everywhere in the world, and in Kenya in particular the number of individual margins sliced off an export price before payment reaches the actual farms is many, leaving only a small percentage to support coffee growth itself. And most often this arrives many months after harvest. KCCE, by managing more of the value chain itself, can capture a greater margin on behalf of the farms.

Kenya is of course known for some of the most meticulous at-scale processing that can be found anywhere in the world. Bright white parchment, nearly perfectly sorted by density and bulk conditioned at high elevations is the norm, and a matter of pride for generations of Kenyan processing managers. Ample water supply in the central growing regions has historically allowed factories to wash, and wash, and soak, and wash their coffees again entirely with fresh, cold river water. Gura typically ferments for 15 hours. After fermentation is complete, the decomposed mucilage is scrubbed away and the clean parchment soaks in a fresh water bath for another 16 hours. The parchment is then graded by density and sent to the drying tables, where it will stay for 2-3 weeks depending on the climate. After drying is complete the coffee is stored on site and eventually delivered to the Othaya dry mill for grading and a final density sort. The established milling and sorting by grade, or bean size, is a longstanding tradition and positions Kenya coffees well for roasters, by tightly controlling the physical preparation and creating a diversity of profiles from a single processing batch.