Farm to farm to cup!

When we bought our little farm, we didn't select this place because we were necessarily looking for a farm. We wanted land, animals, and room for a garden-- it took a while for me to finally realize that what we wanted was, well, basically a farm. Likewise, when I started roasting coffee, it wasn't because I wanted to become a coffee roaster. I wanted to experience great coffee and roasting my own beans gave me options I didn't have otherwise. Initially, my wife and I were delighted that we could experience a new coffee every couple days, drawing from an endless, seasonal, worldwide variety available to us in the form of un-roasted green beans. Researching coffee terroir led us to explore coffee from Africa and Kenya in particular, and the results are amazing. I wanted to share this discovery with friends and family and eventually realized how well this lends itself to an offering for our farm stand and web site.

It is how I approach some problems: figure out the universe of every available option and from those, pick the best one. So I bought samples of every Kenyan coffee I could get my hands on. We tried them all-- and wow what an experience it was-- but there was a clear winner in our tastings. Hands down, no question about it: a coffee experience that was better than all the others. Now, the worst Kenyan coffee in our trials was better than anything I've bought at the supermarket and the top four coffees were just on a level I didn't realize existed. Then as I revealed the results of the final blind tasting, I discovered we had chosen the most expensive coffee from the entire lot. Boutique Kenyan coffee generally carries a price tag to match, for sure, and it just happens that the raw product for our clear favorite sits atop that list. So we had to make sure we wanted to offer this as a product from our little farm: we cupped it, we tried it in a pour over, we tried it in a press, and in every other brewing gadget we had. We also put it in a 12-cup automatic drip left on the warmer for 4 hours. We tried a cheap grinder and we tried a fancy grinder. What one gets, in comparison, from all of these methods varies but the essence of this Kenyan coffee always shines through.

We also looked up the origin of this specific coffee product. Traceability in specialty coffee is highly desired for many reasons such as exploring the terroir of a specific place and understanding if the coffee grower receives fair compensation for their higher-quality product, such as "Farm Gate" programs. Most traceability exercises end successfully at a co-op-- a local facility where many small growers bring their fruit for combined processing. To our delight, we were able to easily track this Kenyan coffee to a specific 40-acre coffee farm called The Oreti Estate in the Thika Plateau of Kenya, 30 miles North of Nairobi. We were able to learn about the specific farmer responsible for this crop (Boyce Harries), and even traded comments with him on social media. Our catchphrase "Farm to Cup" suddenly became "Farm to Farm to Cup" and we are proud to know how our coffee found it's way to us.

This Kenyan coffee carries delightfully tangy acidic citrus flavors layered upon a stout body of berry and spices. We roast it delicately and in small batches to allow the bright origin flavors to shine. Each sip is a 3-act drama of excitement, tension, and resolution enticing another round.

So why bring out a new premium product at a time when the economy is struggling? It is because the opportunity to have this experience exists now. While supermarket coffee is affordable because their roasters often source whatever beans they can get in large lots and deliberately roast them so heavily that consumers can't tell where they came from, our Kenyan coffee offering is quite the opposite-- it is from a specific place, grown by a specific, named farmer; roasted in a way to highlight the origin, and offered only while supplies last. Unfortunately, it's necessarily priced higher than our other coffees because the raw product is expensive (I am still chasing the elusive bargain gem of a bean). Meanwhile, our Kenyan offering is rewarding for coffee enthusiasts and absolutely approachable by everyone. We think it is a fantastic expression of what Kenyan coffee can be and a great opportunity to learn what that even means.

We are now offering this roasted whole bean coffee in our online shop for as long as we can get the beans. So order them now.

Cupping Coffees from Kenya