Kenya Nyeri Githiru AB

Githiru is a coffee farmer's cooperative and washing station in the town of Githiru, Nyeri. Called "factories" in Kenya, these processing sites are where cooperative members bring their coffee to be processed and prepared for export. Factories are generally aligned with larger cooperative societies ("FCS" = "Farmers Cooperative Societies") that are an umbrella for a handful of wet mills. In this case Githiru is both the name of the factory/wet mill and also the FCS that it and a few other wet mills are a part of. The farmers who deliver coffee to Githiru are growing coffee between a range of 1350 to 1900 meters above sea level. There are almost 900 members of Githiru, and most are growing a mixture of SL-28 and SL-34 cultivars, with small amounts of Ruiru and Batian mixed in. This coffee was purchased direct, not through the Kenya auction system, so we could avoid the risk of losing it. To do this we pay a price that is higher than what the top auction bid might be, but it means we get the exact lot we want. During the final dry milling, the coffee seeds are separated by size range, measured in 1/64 of an inch (they call these separations "outturns"). The higher qualities that are most common in specialty coffee are AB (15-17 screen, or 15-17 1/64 of an inch), Peaberry (15 screen) and AA (17-19 screen). This is the AB lot, though we did find a few peaberries in the few hundred grams we looked over. This is fairly common since peaberries are often in the size range that is screened out for AB.