Overview
This is a moderately low intervention washed coffee from Nyeri county, Kenya, produced by smallholder farmers organized under the Gatugi coffee factory and Othaya Cooperative Union.
The flavor profile is electric and very classically Kenyan in its elevated acidity, reminding us of grapefruit, black tea, fresh ginger, and orange soda.
Our roasters found, unsurprisingly, that this bright Kenyan coffee craved heat. Feel free to roast with full power!
When brewed, we recommend a flat bottom brewer to balance all the acidity this coffee has, but it could also be fun to lean into it with a conical brewer.
Source Analysis by Charlie Habegger
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 six irregular pie slices, with their points meeting at the peak of the mountain. It is along the lower edge of these 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. 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 Gatugi Factory, is one of Kenya’s larger societies, with 19 different factories and more than 14,000 farmer members across the southern Nyeri region. The Gatugi Factory has 500 members actively harvesting and delivering to the processing center. The factory’s total cherry intake tends to hover around 323,000 kgs, meaning the average member of Gatugi is farming enough coffee fruit for roughly two 60kg bags of exportable green.
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 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. The chairman of Mahiga Factory, another Othaya FCS member, happens to also be one of the founding directors of KCCE—so, the participation of Othaya FCS in farmer-forward infrastructure in Kenya is strong.
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, even for generations of Kenyan processing managers who prefer drinking Kenya’s tea (abundantly farmed in nearby Muranga county) to its coffee. 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.
Gatugi typically ferments for 27-35 hours depending on ambient conditions (the changing mountain climate, as for many processors, tends to dictate fermentation temperatures, and Mahiga staff are required to check fermentation progress every three hours). After fermentation, the parchment is rinsed and the water replenished, and the clean parchment soaks for an additional 12 hours, after which it is sorted by density and brought to the tables to dry, typically for two weeks. 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.
Aillio Bullet R1 IBTS Analysis by Evan Gilman
We use the RoasTime app and roast.world site to document our roasts on the Bullet. You can find our roast documentation below by searching on roast.world, or by clicking on the link below. Take a look at our roast profiles below, as they are constantly changing!
I always, always love roasting a Kenyan coffee! This is an old favorite, and a name I’ve continued to see ever since my early coffee years. I knew the angle of attack here: start hot but give plenty of airflow. I also knew to expect an early crack (as tends to happen with most well-sorted coffees), and to spend 20% or more of my roast in post-crack development. Sounds weird at first, but the results are always exquisite.
Starting with a rather spicy 482F, I kept this coffee at P8 and F2 until the rate of change began to drop from its peak of 37F/min. I then reduced to P7 and increased fan to F4 before yellowing, which happened nearly a minute faster than usual. Yes, I was cooking. This began to catch up to me, and at 365F / 5:30 I decided to pull some more heat from the system by engaging P6 and F5. This coffee wanted to keep going, but that prior move did tamp down the rate of change, and I reduced airflow a bit moving into first crack in order to keep the seeds cracking. My last move was to reduce heat to P5 and allow the coffee to roll through post-crack development. I dropped the coffee at 394F / 8:25 and enjoyed the aromas from the cooling tray wantonly.
This is just a classic example of what Kenyan coffee can bring to the table, cupping or otherwise. There are some very ‘foody’ aromatics and flavors here, and while the Sungold tomato brightness might be surprising at first, I think almost anyone with an open mind can get into this flavor. It’s not Campbell’s soup tomato – it's that luminous-yellow peak-of-harvest summer tomato plucked straight from the vine. It’s memories in a garden underneath the plum tree at the end of the season. It’s a blackberry just a touch before perfect ripeness. This is an incredibly seasonal and nostalgic coffee for many reasons for me, and I hope you can start some memories with it as well!
You can follow along with my roast here at roast.world: https://roast.world/egilman/roasts/ZyA3CcyJxzO4Hyg4GnEWc
