Kenya Othaya Gura AB

This coffee is from the Gura Factory, a washing station that rests near the banks of the Gura river. Nothing industrious about this "factory", except for the machinery to wash and depulp coffee cherries. Gura is one of 19 washing stations that make up the Othaya Farmer's Cooperative Society, a coop-run organization, one of the older ones I might add. Altitude of the washing station is just shy of 1750 meters and the coffee is grown on up to 2000 meters. We mostly see SL-28 and SL-34 cultivars, with some Ruiru-11 and Batian mixed in here and there. We try our best to return to the societies who regularly produce some of the best Kenya coffees we see and each year we come across coffees new to us, just like Gura. 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. In Kenya, coffee is graded by size as well as defect count, the higher grades (called "outturns") being AA, AB and Peaberry. While AA generally commands the highest premium, we found this AB lot from Gura be a brighter cup.