Dear subscriber,
As I am writing this I am situated in Nairobi, Kenya, where I am tasting and selecting coffees to buy from the recent harvest. Many of you love east-African coffees and there is no secret that I do too. This month I have selected two coffees from one of my favorite wet mills in Kenya, Karinga, that is actually coming from the same lot or outturn as they call it in Kenya. The only difference is the size of the beans, but you might also find that they have a different taste balance. We have also been saving some of the small amounts of washed coffee from Tatmara to send out to our subscribers. 74110 is a different cultivar to the 74140 lot we sent out late last year.
I hope you will enjoy the last lots we have from the previous harvest and can already say that we have a lot of nice coffees from Kenya and Ethiopia to look forward to in 2026.
KARINGA AA (1st & 4th bag)
This coffee is grown at around 1900 masl in Kiambu where the climate is cool and makes the coffee ripen slower and develop more flavour, sweetness and acidity.
Most of the members who sell their coffee cherries to this wet mill mainly grow the traditional SL28 and SL34 cultivars because of their good yields and exceptional quality in high altitudes. Of course you will find the rust tolerant coffee hybrids Batian and Ruiru 11 grown on these farms, still the majority of the farmers in this area are reluctant to plant them as they demand more inputs to grow well.
For me this coffee has been a standout for several years when I have been tasting coffees in Kenya because of its intensity of flavour. It has a crisp acidity and an intense fruity and floral character that makes it both intense and elegant at the same time.
AA is a grade used in Kenya that indicates that it is the largest beans from this particular outturn of coffee. This is considered to be the best qualities and that is my experience too. For that reason we mainly buy AA grades from Kenya.
TATMARA (2st & 5th bag)
In 2022 we held a fund raiser during our 15 year anniversary and collected money that we donated to Negussie in order to fund the construction of a new wet mill on his farm. The wet mill was completed in October 2023 and I was able to be there to oversee the first lot being processed at the new mill. It was very beneficial to be able to be there right at the start of the harvest. It meant that we could see the mill in use and uncover any risks and make a protocol on how we would like our coffees to be processed.
We asked Negussie to separate all daily pickings, to dry the coffees under shade nets and to store the coffees in air tight grain pro bags after drying, making sure every daily picking was properly marked.
We also agreed upon the processing protocol, ensuring good results by controlling fermentation and implementing soaking of the coffee after the mucilage was removed mechanically.
As soon as the coffees were dried, samples were sent to us in Oslo in order to be able to give feedback and evaluate the quality.
The harvest went really well much thanks to the help and follow up done by Fantanesh Keleme and the whole team at Belco in Ethiopia, who made sure Negussie was properly trained and followed the protocols for all the coffees he produced for us. In fact none of the washed coffees were rejected as all of them ended up tasting really good.
This year we were able to separate three of Negussie’s cultivars 74110, 74112 and 74140. They are all from seeds from the Jimma Agricultural research Center and are among the so called «new and improved» cultivars that now are commonly planted across Ethiopia. This particular lot is a blend of 7 daily pickings of the cultivar 74110. I personally have found this to be the best by a tiny margin among the three cultivars Negussie grows, but it might be a coincidence too that it has cupped slightly better than the other ones in the past two years. Despite having challeging weather conditions throughout the 2024/25 harvest , Negussie was still able to produce a small amount of clean and tasty coffees with maybe slight lower flavour intensity than what the 2023/24 season offered. I still find distinct peachy and floral flavours in this coffee.
KARINGA PB (3st & 6th bag)
This is the Peaberry screens from the same coffee outturn as the AA lot we are sending out this month. Peaberries are the small round beans that forms when there is only one coffee bean inside a coffee cherry. For whatever reason they are not considered to be as good as the AA grade. Still I find a lot of times the peaberry grades taste really intense and clean with maybe a bit bigger body than the AA grades. They are also easy to roast as the beans are completely round and have no flat side like normal coffee beans are shaped. The reason why we only buy them on occation is that normally the size of the lots can be as small as 60 kg. But I do love a good peaberry from Kenya.
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