Kitsune - Kenya Thunguri

SUMMARY

This is our third consecutive year of working with Peter Mbature and his company Kamavindi Coffee Lab to spearhead this special project with the producers of the Thunguri Coffee Factory. Peter led the way with the help of Washing station manager/chairman Mr. Mbote along with his amazing team at Thunguri. Mr. Mbote directly provided the management and arrangement of cherry collection, post harvest production and setting up all of the fermentation equipment in order to execute the project. Every year prior to the main coffee harvest in Nyeri, Peter directly assists producers at Thunguri with pre and post harvest production workshops in order to prepare and provide education on cherry selection for naturals, anaerobic fermentation courses, and enhanced drying techniques for drying naturally processed coffees. This year also marked the first inaugural year that Kamavindi provided our general oversight of the project, in country logistics, and export services.

These types of lots do not happen randomly or by chance, and are not reliant on any auctions. They are completely intentional. The coffee belongs to the farmer during the sales process and does not change ownership from the farmer until it is contracted. Because of this arrangement and effort to bring more farmers to the table to have more control of their coffee, a premium cherry price is pre-negotiated before harvest begins with the farmers and prior to the committal to produce naturals or to participate in these types of projects. Once an agreed price is reached between the farmers and coop, the cherries are picked and the weight is recorded when the coffee is delivered to the wet mill. The basis for payment to the farmer is once the coffee is sold. The agreement reflects that the coop and exporter retains 20% of the sales value to cover dry milling, logistics, pre harvest financing, cost of export and the farmer is paid 80% of the overall contract price, which results in significantly higher premiums than local market prices paid at auction. This project began with creating 2 bags as an experiment in 2021. Today the project has grown to the production of 43 bags.

In normal times, Kenya can be a very complex country to plan & forecast. It’s actually a labyrinth of never-ending new rules and new regulations that are created with the “best” of intentions to protect and assure profitability for the hard work performed by smallholder producers, but in the end it traditonally doesn’t seem to work out that way at scale. In reality, this year the coffee industry in Kenya came to a screeching halt due to new imposed service regulations by the Kenyan government. The objective of the new regulations were to separate specific specialized services from each other. The new regulation in place required that a company could only engage in marketing, milling, or export and had to comply by offering that particular service alone and could not offer a combination of services. This resulted in many marketing agents, millers, and exporters in Kenya having their licenses revoked leading to confusion and delays. The new imposed regulations left many scrambling for guidance, but without active licenses, importers, roasters and exporters couldn’t buy or ship any coffee for export in Kenya. Somehow we all worked closely together to Macgyver a strategy to assure not only our partnering producers were 100% covered by purchasing all of their coffees in the project, but all of our collaborating partners were covered in the middle of the chaos as well. The last few years have been a roller coaster trying to plan for Kenya due to the unknowns and anxiety left in the wake of Covid plus the deteriorating affects of climate change that are having a profound affect on the Kenyan coffee harvests. Year after year in Kenya, the coffee harvests in Kenya are alarmingly becoming a concern due to either too much rain, or not enough rain resulting in drier conditions that can ultimately affect qualities and uneven maturation due to warmer and drier conditions. This can have a larger impact predominantly on washed coffee especially for storage conditions. Climate change has affected Kenyan coffee production through unpredictable rainfall patterns and excessive droughts, making crop management and disease control a daunting challenge. Through all of the adversity and all of the challenges Kenya faces, the producers in Kenya still manage to always wow us with their coffee and their resilience to succeed against all odds. We’re always amazed and honored to work with our amazing collaborators and partners in Kenya and this would not be possible without you or your support.

PROCESSING

The cherries are weighed following picking, and then floated to select the cherries of the absolute heaviest density, also hence the grade NH (Natural Heavy). Awesome fact, a total of 20,590 kilograms worth of coffee cherries were purchased and collected to make this anaerobic lot. Roughly equivalent to 45,400 lbs worth of coffee cherries. After cherry selection is completed, the initial fermentation starts in airtight hermetically sealed drums for 72 hours. Each drum is loaded with 100kg (220 lbs) worth of whole coffee cherry and equipped with an exit breather hose that is immersed in a pure ethanol bath to ensure that no oxygen is able to reach the fermenting cherries. Following the initial fermentation phase for 72 hours in the fermentation drums, the cherries are immediately spread thinly on raised drying beds for a duration of 4 days and then rearranged to be heaped at 1 inch on the raised beds and dried for an additional 20 - 26 days. The cherries are turned routinely through out the day to assure calibrated maturation and exposure during the drying phase. Following hulling (removal of any remanent dried cherry mucilage) the coffee is then shipped down to the dry mill to get the coffees ready for export. The coffee undergoes a series of iterations: manual hand sorting, gravity density sorting and most importantly, numerous passes through an optical color sorter to assure that the coffee is of the absolute highest degree of pristine quality.