Kigwandi is part of a cooperative society consisting of 7 factories (wet mills) and almost 5,000 individual small famers, in the heart of Kenya’s Nyeri county. This lot is zippy with tangerine-like acids, tart cherry, dried rose and sugar cane.
Welcome to Nyeri
Mt. Kenya, at the helm of Kenya’s Central Province, is the second tallest peak on the continent of Africa and a commanding natural presence. The mountain itself is a single point inside a vast and surreal thicket of ascending national forest and active game protection communities. The central counties of Kenya extend from the center of the national park, like five irregular pie slices, with their points meeting at the peak of the mountain. It is along the lower edge of the forests where, in wet, high elevation communities with mineral-rich soil (Mt. Kenya is a stratovolcano) many believe the best coffees in Kenya, often the world, are crafted. Nyeri is perhaps the most well-known of these central counties.
Mutheka FCS & Processing
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. Mutheka Farmers Cooperative Society (FCS) includes Chorong’i, Kaiguri, Kiandu, Kamuyu, Kigwandi, Kihuyo, and Muthua-ini factories. It was once part of a massive FCS known as Tetu (named after the sub-county in Nyeri where most of the factories stand), which split into smaller cooperative societies in 2004.
Across the factories of Mutheka FCS, famer members average 200 trees apiece. Tetu sub-county, where the members live, is right on the edge of Kenya’s Aberdare mountain range—so, combined with the massive biome of nearby Mt. Kenya, is surrounded by high elevation national parks on multiple sides, both of which contribute cold nighttime temperatures, rich soils, and fresh ground water to this corner of Nyeri county.
As cherry comes to Kigwandi factory it is hand-sorted on intake to eliminate any imperfections and then weighed and logged under the contributing farmer’s name. Cherry is blended and depulped, and then fermented in water for 24 hours. Once fermentation is complete, the parchment is rinsed and moved to raised beds for drying. The drying phase is typically 2-3 weeks for the coffee to reach 10-12% humidity. Finally, fully dried parchment is rested in large, perforated bins on site, a process that allows the bean’s internal moisture to stabilize for the long transit and shelf life ahead.
KCCE – Farmer-centric exporting
Mutheka FCS is one of the 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 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.
