Wormhole Coffee Log: Kenya

First up in a new series of regional profiles to be dispersed bi-monthly on the Wormblog for your educational enjoyment, we have Kenya, a country known for producing some of the finest, and most expensive, coffees in the world. As you will come to discover (we hope, we hope), the Kenyan coffee experience is nuanced and pit-fallen in ways that play out both on the coffee market and in the beans themselves.

It’s amazing to consider, when you take a closer look, just how many hands come into contact with a plant that we typically just see in it’s final form. Yes, I said plant! It’s easy to lose sight of coffee as an agricultural product when the trees on which it is grown are rooted thousands of miles away, and yet, the people who tend to them must think all the time about us, as we are the reason those trees exist in the first place.

We hope that by offering an inside look into countries of origin, we are able to give the consumer (cafe-goers and coffee professionals alike, as we are all, at this latitude, buyers of coffee in one way or another) a greater understanding of the complexity that exists within the coffee industry, in terms of farming, processing, trading, and culture. We hope you enjoy, and maybe even do some research of your own! Signed: Otter

The Kenyan coffee industry, through such traditions as meticulous harvesting, post-fermentation soaking, and post-process sorting, produces some of the cleanest and most consumer-friendly coffees on the market today.

The crisp, apple-like acidity, deep red wine and blackberry flavours typical of high-quality Kenyan coffees, as well as being the results of processing, are also some of the more common tasting notes of the SL-28 and SL-34 varietals* that account for the majority of the coffee grown in the country.

Although the quality of Kenyan specialty coffee is typically above the industry average and has remained that way for the past decade, the coffee sector and the country itself have been experiencing some serious problems due to water shortages, political instability, and market collapse, that may affect production in the near future.

Where It’s Grown

The main growing regions for specialty coffee are concentrated around and between the dormant volcano of Mt. Kenya and the capital city of Nairobi to the south. The mountain is the second highest in all of Africa, behind Kilimanjaro, and the indigenous people of the surrounding area consider it sacred (the local name for it, Kirinyaga, translates literally as “God’s resting place”).

The moderate temperatures, equatorial sunlight and rich, volcanic soils surrounding Mt. Kenya are prime conditions for coffee growing. All coffee in Kenya is grown between 1,400-2,100 meters above sea level, and is harvested between October and December. 99% of the plants are of the Arabica sub-species, and almost all are picked by hand. Although coffee’s native homeland of Ethiopia borders Kenya to the north, coffee wasn’t cultivated in the region until the late nineteenth century when it was introduced, curiously, not from Ethiopia, but by French missionaries from Reunion Island. Although the original plants brought to country were of the Bourbon varietal (pronounced “bore-BONE”), these days most of those original Bourbon plants have been replaced by the higher-yielding SL-28 and SL-34 strains. These were developed by coffee researchers at Scott Laboratories in the 1930’s (in addition to these strains, the researchers at Scott Labs also produced a lesser-quality strain known as Ruiri-11, which contains Robusta* genetics and whose beans have a dirty acidity that is inferior to the other two strains). More info here.

The SL-28 and 34 strains are famous for their complexity in the cup, often reminiscent of blackberries and Cabernet. Experiments done growing these varietals in other parts of the world have confirmed these flavours to be intrinsic to the varietals themselves (even more info here).

Real People, By Hand

Kenyan coffee production has an extremely high reliance on human labor at all stages of the production process. Approximately 60 percent of the coffee in Kenya is produced by smallholder farms of 5 acres or less, organized into cooperatives that market and distribute the coffees of their associated small producers (LOTS of info here). Unfortunately, despite the fact that this country produces some of the world’s greatest coffees, the coffee farmers themselves remain some of the poorest in the industry. Due to a collapse in the early 2000’s of the market system which allowed farmers to purchase fertilizer on loan, many typical coffee farmers have been suffering with declining yields and worsening quality year after year.

According to an article in 2006 by the Inter Press News Service, the average smallholder farmer was being paid approximately 20 cents per kilogram of green coffee, which was then passed through several coffee middle-men to eventually garnish around 3 dollars per kilo at auction. This huge discrepancy is in part due to a corrupt market system whereby nearly all coffee in Kenya is sold at weekly auctions, and is then exported through one of three government-controlled marketing agencies.

Until recently, acquiring coffee from Kenya meant going through government channels which made the individual farmer practically non-existent in terms of the market value chain, and inhibited efforts to increase transparency and quality control. In the past several years there have been efforts from many specialty coffee roasters and importers to bypass the industry middle men by engaging with growers at the source–visiting farms and small washing stations, and cupping coffees with the producers themselves in order to give constructive feedback and to encourage dialogue about how quality, and profit, can be improved on a production level.

The Beans Themselves

Going back to the coffee itself, the typical Kenyan coffee is wet-processed, meaning the fruit of the cherry is separated from seed (the bean) by submerging the cherry, after the skin has been removed, in tanks of water which are sometimes treated with small amounts of organic acids to speed up the fermentation process. The flesh, or mucilage as it is referred to in the industry, begins to break down during the immersion stage and is then removed using running water that washes away the loosened mucilage.

The coffee may be soaked and rinsed more than once before being laid out on patios for sun-drying. One of the advantages of wet processing is that it helps equalize the water content of the beans, making them easier to roast and imparting a more balanced flavour in the liquid. Drawbacks include a need for large quantities of clean running water, and for skilled operators to work the various machines involved. Also important, if often neglected, is the disposal of the waste water which can be harmful to the environment, especially in ecologically sensitive areas where much of the world’s coffee is grown.

Because of the complex mechanics involved with wet processing, coffee farmers must bring their individual harvests to a washing station where the processing will occur. These washing stations are of varying degrees of sophistication. The best stations execute procedures that wash each lot separately according to rigorous standards using well cared for machinery. On the other end of the spectrum, there are washing stations that are so abysmal that they destroy what could have been good coffee with improper processing done on faulty, poorly maintained, often ancient equipment, often due to lack of access to information, and the inability to replace or repair machinery because of the high cost. Because processing must occur as soon after harvesting as possible, many times farmers in remote areas have no choice but to use the station nearest to them, even if it means sacrificing the quality of the beans.

Of course, balance and flavor are also products of the beans themselves, and coffee, being an organic product, is full of imperfections, which is why it all must be sorted to distinguish the good from the bad. In Kenya, as in many countries, the beans are sorted through screens as well as by hand, in order to produce the kinds of high-quality lots that specialty coffee buyers are looking for. For most of the coffee in Kenya a grading system is used based on screen hole size, and therefore bean size–the larger the bean, the higher the quality–and those grades dictate how much that coffee will be sold for at auction. The major drawback to this system is that it invalidates the individual farmer by pooling many separate lots of coffee together into one giant batch that is then sold by grade, such as the famous “Kenya AA”, which is simply the largest screen hole size and nothing more.

From the Road: Kenya, June 2010 from Counter Culture

This homogenizing effect makes it easy to ignore the needs and demands of the growers themselves, since it is not being sold by individual lot. Many specialty coffee companies are pushing for greater transparency by demanding information about where the coffee was grown, by who, at what altitude, and so forth. Since many times much of this information cannot be obtained through auction, importers are traveling to the farms and washing stations themselves to search for these answers, and to cut out the middle men who are siphoning profits from the labor of the farmers. Such efforts by companies like Counter Culture Coffee and Intelligentsia are well documented and can be followed on their websites, often on blogs written by the buyers themselves (an example here).

In the specialty coffee sector, many advances to processing methods have been made over the past years which are changing the fortunes of many small shareholders. These include such things as utilizing raised drying beds instead of patios; improving machinery such as the depulpers which can, if not working properly, cause damage to the beans; and investing in training and education for the farmers themselves so they can understand and perform quality control at the source instead of having to depend on industry professionals who may be far away, expensive, and possibly corrupt.

Long Way To Go

The coffee industry still has a long way to go to bridge the producer/consumer gap (consider that most countries that grow coffee barely consume it, compared to rates in the U.S.), but by promising higher prices for coffees that meet certain standards, more farmers will be likely to make the extra effort. This is especially important in countries like Kenya, where many small farmers are giving up on their coffee trees in favor of more reliable crops, things like maize or bananas.

Kenyan coffee has the potential to be some of the best in the world, but without a fair market and access to vital information regarding quality and industry expectations, one can hardly blame those that choose to go the safer route.

Illustrations by: Stevie Baka (find her at Wormhole!)