KENYA Peaberry!??!?!?!

It’s about time. My bad on holding out so long on one of my favorite coffee producing origins . Kenyan coffee rides in its own lane… The ‘macro’ cup profiles that are produced have a wide range of expression and flavors that all remain somewhat unique to Kenya; from face-melting-bight-juice-bombs, to thick and jammy deeply sweet cups.

So… let’s riff. This coffee hails from the New Rumukia Farmers Cooperative Society (Rumukia) located in the famous Nyeri County. Rumikia is one of the region's oldest societies, beginning their operations in 1979. With just 1200 contributing members, it is also one of the region's smaller coops, sending their harvests out to one of the three washing stations: Thunguri, Gaikundu and Kagunyu. Nyeri is a central county that stems off of the continent's tallest peak, Mt. Kenya. These central counties are regarded as having produced some of the best coffees in the world year on year. As you scale down from the central peak of Mt. Kenya you hit the lower ridge where these high elevation farming communities are located in dense, wet, and mineral-rich soils - fun fact, Mt. Kenya is a Stratovolcano . As stated by Royal Coffee: Kenya’s coffee economy 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.

Kenya is known for some of the most meticulous at-scale processing in the world. With ample water supply in the central regions has historically allowed washing stations to wash, and wash, and soak, and wash their coffees again and again with fresh, cold river water. Rumukia's stations process their coffees in this ‘double washed’ fashion with a unique post-processing clean water soak acting as an additional washing step. This process tends to produce a measurable quality improvement which has been identified by both coffee tasters and academic researchers. The established milling and sorting by grade aka bean size, is a longstanding tradition and works well with the modern coffee roaster by tightly controlling the physical parameters.

This lot that we have here is a peaberry grade! How FUN! For those unfamiliar with the term, a peaberry is a cute and round coffee seed which forms as a single embryo instead of the usual two inside of a coffee cherry. Peaberrys represent about 5% of an annual Kenyan coffee harvest and this one lives up to the sweeeeeet and focused cup profile. This lot comprises the heavy hitting usual suspects of juice creation, that's the SL28 and SL34 cultivars which were selections made in the 1930s from legacy Bourbon and Typica populations that were best suited for the Kenyan coffee conditions. More recently Ruiru 11 and Batian have entered the fold and are proprietary hybrids that integrate the genetics of more than a dozen separate varieties with the goal of improving quality, yield, and disease resistance.

Ight, so what’s in the cup? This is a slick-bodied coffee with an absurd level of sweetness and an acidity that packs a punch. Rumukia is one of my favorite types of Kenyan cup profiles and is the type of coffee I want to drink all day long. From the loud af aromatics, to the juicy body, to the ole’ sweetness level turned to 11, this coffee slaps. I’m getting hit with those bright, but endlessly juicy, dank ruby red grapefruits up front alongside an awesome plum (black if you want me to be specific) sweet-leaning-tartness which all sits upon a foundation of brown sugar….