Year after year, Kirinyaga coffee has earned top ranking from Coffee Review, an online publication that analyses the quality of beans globally.

Coffee grown in Kirinyaga is well known for ripe, fruit-forward profiles. Add to this one of coffee's best accidents—the diminutive peaberry—and you have a resounding cup. Many believe that the naturally occurring peaberry—where the coffee cherry produces one plump, round bean instead of two halves—doubles the flavor and sugar of the seed and is easier to roast.

Whether it’s the fine soil, the high elevation, or the influence of the otherworldly peaberry—this coffee sparkles. Imagine verdant kiwi, with its star-like glitter of black seeds, crossed with the tropical notes of lemongrass.

Coffee from the Kirinyaga region of Kenya flourishes in rich, volcanic soil and after selective hand picking, is hand processed in fresh water. Full of sweet complex flavors, lively acidity, and rich velvet body, specialty lots of Kirinyaga coffees carry a distinct terroir that some call classic Kenyan flavor. Here the climate is very like a European summer and much of the coffee grows in the shade of towering over story.

Kirinyaga has both smallholders and medium-sized farms, some of which have their own processing equipment. For those that don’t, wet mills are accessible at local cooperative sites. Co-op member farmers can utilize any mill they choose, and unlike many coffee producing nations, Kenya’s traditional auction system rewards higher quality with higher prices, creating incentive for excellence both in coffee cultivation and processing.

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. Kirinyaga county is certainly well-known among these central counties for its jammy, exuberant coffees. 

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. It’s not perfect, 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. However, Kenya coffees are sold competitively by quality, which means well-endowed counties like Kirinyaga achieve very high average prices year after year, and the smallholders here with a few hundred trees at the most are widely considered to be middle class.

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 and Kiambu counties) to its coffee. 

Ample ground and river water supply in Kirinyaga has historically allowed factories to wash, and wash, and soak, and wash their coffees again entirely with fresh, cold river water. Conservation is creeping into the discussion in certain places--understandably in the drier areas where water, due to climate change, cannot be as taken for granted—but for the most part Kenya continues to thoroughly wash and soak its coffees according to tradition. Cooperatives at Kabare FCS are no different, sorting their pulped and fermented coffee into 4 different density grades with the use of fresh nearby water, and conditioning the moisture of each grade independently during drying, before transport to the mill.