Kenya AA Select +

Kenya has long been established as leader in high-grade East African arabica. With regards to acidity and brightness, Kenya is widely recognized as the bar—its best lots are famed for their fruity, clean, complex profiles, offering balance and pronounced tasting notes of everything from berries and stone fruit to sweet citrus, rightly fetching a handsome auction price.

The Nairobi Coffee Exchange auctions are a quality based payment system that functions as the nerve center of a well oiled industry built upon decades of lab-based agri-research, applied farming and a strong network of cooperatives. At the exchanges small farmers can access a wide range of international buyers who outbid one another for the perfect cup. Truth be told, Kenya’s growers are owed much of today’s industry praise; for generations they have pushed the envelope and tested the limits of farming and processing capabilities in order to embrace advances in growing science. The main growing regions extend from the 17,000 foot, central peak of Mount Kenya all the way to the outskirts of the capital city of Nairobi to the south. Another portion of arabica farmlands lie on the slopes of Mt. Elgon, against Kenya’s western border with Uganda.

The ‘Kenyan Process’ double fermentation method requires pulped cherries be twice soaked for 12 to 24 hours in fermentation tanks with additional rinsing in between. When finished the beans are separated by density by way of a water channel, removing the less dense “floaters”. The beans then undergo one final soak to reportedly promote healthy amino and fatty acid structures. Next the beans are sun-dried on raised beds under strict supervision for approximately 1 to 2 weeks until their moisture is reduced to 11–12%.