Kenya

There’s a reason why so many coffee professionals around the world will name Kenya as their favorite origin. It’s because we tend to obsess over organic fruit acids and clarity of flavor, and the best coffees from Kenya have a vibrancy that outshines all others. It is easy to detect Kenyan coffees in a blind tasting—even those new to specialty coffee learn to recognize their distinct character quickly because it commands your attention from the first taste. Nothing about Kenyan coffee is quiet, and yet the great ones are so elegant and refined that they seem almost gentle despite their amplitude of flavor.

Kenya is able to turn out beautiful coffees so regularly because the farms have all the right ingredients for quality and a recipe no one else can replicate. The unique combination of extended dry-fermentation times, meticulous post-wash soaking, and a prolonged, low-velocity drying period contributes to the astounding depth, intensity, and clarity of flavor in Kenyan coffees. In fact, the contribution of Kenya’s dominant varieties and distinctive post-harvest processes to cup quality have been so widely recognized that both are being embraced around the world.

Kenya’s primary coffee region lies smack on the equator, and the elevation of farms there is exceptionally high, up to 2100 meters above sea level in some cases. This combination of intense sunlight and cool nights is ideal for the development of sugars and organic acids. The coffees manage to be intense, transparent, complex, and profoundly sweet all at once. It is very, very difficult to achieve this balance of power and grace in coffee, and the fact that Kenyan coffees accomplish it so consistently is amazing.

Kenya’s coffee sector is dominated by farmer cooperatives—voluntary, democratically run associations of smallholder farmers whose annual harvests are very small. Each one generally operates one or more “factories”—wet mills where they receive, sort, and process fresh coffee cherries from their members in preparation for export. This model is common throughout East and Central Africa, and it’s fundamentally different from the way smallholder coffee is processed in the Americas, where smallholders customarily process their cherry at the farm level, building a significant degree of variability into the process.

The centralization of these processes at wet mills in Kenya permits a degree of standardization and quality control that helps make Kenyan coffees some of the most pristine in the world. If there is a downside to this approach, it’s that it is difficult to source coffee from individual farms—an approach that allows greater transparency and ability to build quality from the ground up.

After more than a decade of sourcing Kenyan coffees through the prevailing cooperative system, we began working in 2016 to complement that approach with a new effort to source single-farm “estate” lots from small-scale producers interested in engaging with the market directly. With this approach, growers who are committed to quality and willing to put in the work required to produce extraordinary coffee can take control of every step in the process and chart their own path into the market. Through the first few years of this work, our efforts to build a reliable network of small, quality-focused farms was marked by true serendipity.

We have been working with Mary Mainnah since 2016, but it feels like we have been collaborating for much, much longer.

Generally, we proceed slowly when we are developing new Direct Trade partnerships, often not purchasing any coffee for the first few seasons we are getting to know each other. But in Mary’s case, things were very different. We met Mary in 2016, and it is fair to say we were swept away—by her charisma, her drive, and her juicy coffee. We purchased a small lot to get things started—a lot that turned out to be one of the top-performing coffees we purchased all year. It won the award for best smallholder coffee in 2017 at our inaugural Extraordinary Coffee Competition (ECC), a global coffee quality contest among Intelligentsia Direct Trade partners held as part of our annual Extraordinary Coffee Workshop (ECW). ECW is like coffee’s version of an all-star weekend, a room crowded with growers from around the world who have taken top honors at the Cup of Excellence, and ECC is the all-star game where they compete with one another in an atmosphere of friendly competition and mutual respect. Mary broke onto the scene in style, carrying home hardware as a rookie.

She took that award back to Nyeri as encouragement to double down on her investment in quality, and she inspired her neighbors in the process. Since then, we have worked closely with Mary, her husband, Kevin, and the dedicated team at Manyeki Estate to continue building on those early successes. And we have taken time to get to know some of her coffee-growing friends and neighbors, adding one to our Direct Trade network over each of the next two seasons, starting with Wangera Farm in 2017.