Kiambu county sits adjacent to Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city, and is a coffee powerhouse. Along with an extensive community of coffee mills, exporter warehouses, quality labs, and the Kenya Coffee College and Coffee Research Institute (near Ruiru Town, after which the disease-resistant hybrid “Ruiru-11” is named), Kiambu is also home to many of Kenya’s largest and oldest coffee estates.
The Oaklands estate is a longstanding coffee estate and land development project just outside Ruiru town in a dense and productive agricultural area. The estate produces a number of different qualities of coffee, including full natural lots like this one, that are hand sorted and dried in the sun on raised beds.
Estate Coffee in Kenya
It’s hard to convey the contrast between an estate of this size—even after many subdividisions it is still tens of square hectares—and Kenya’s average coffee farm, which is often a few hundred individual trees or less, with no processing or storage capacity. Estates such as Oaklands were mostly established during British colonialism, before indigenous Kenyans were allowed to produce coffee themselves, instead forced to work for free for the British state. As coffee estates have changed hands in the decades since Kenya’s independence, management structures have also changed, now frequently owned by groups of shareholders, or, in Oaklands’ case, by a large developer.
Many of Kenya’s large estates are preserved in Kiambu county, a rapidly urbanizing region thanks to its proximity to Nairobi. So, the persistence of properties like these makes them even more unique in the changing landscape over time. Ruiru Town is Kenya’s 6th largest urban municipality and if development continues the way it has, many expect a majority-urban county in just a few years. Yet the large estate system persists, and in many cases reflects both Kenya’s colonial origins and its current identity as a self-actualized producer of some of the world’s most obsessed-over profiles.
Natural Processing at Oaklands
At Oaklands estate each stage of harvest and post-harvest processing is carried out by a specialized team. Once picked coffee is delivered to the on-site “factory” (Kenya’s name for a centralized washing station), where it is hand-sorted and floated for density. The most uniform and dense cherry is then moved to tanks where it ferments underwater for 12 hours to partially break down the seed’s surrounding mucilage and, in the experience of Oakalands’ processors, enhance the sweetness of the final coffee. After this brief fermentation step cherry is transfered straight to raised screen tables to dry in the sun, a process that typically takes 4-5 weeks due to the cold and humid nighttime climate. As is common among cooperatives and estates alike throughout Kenya, fully dried cherry is conditioned in bulk for multiple weeks in large containers prior to dry milling, to allow the newly dried coffee time to distribute its internal moisture and stabilize its quality for the long term.
