Kenya – Muiri Estate – Organic – Green Unroasted

Taste: Wow! This bean is packed with flavor. It also takes a dark roast well for a more smoky, velvety mouthfeel.

Roast: We prefer Kenyans at Full City to bring out some of the subtle nuances of the bean.

About: Farm Size- 443 acres of land, 40 acres dam, 216 acres under coffee (100% Organic)

The farm includes a washing station, parchment stores and a shed for dairy cows. Before the dairy cows were brought onto the estate the estate manager Daniel Muinde would have to send trucks many hundreds of kilometers to the east to purchase manure gathered  from traditional Maasai pastoralists. The herd feeds on the grassland on the estate that grows on the sandier soils where coffee does not prosper. Now the farm has its own supply of manure which is dug into the soil around the trees.

Muiri Estate has two harvests  in June-Aug and another in Oct-Dec which are typical of the region and are a direct consequence of the double rainfall pattern, as each rainy period will stimulate a flowering of the coffee tree setting off the start of a cycle where 8-9 months later the ripe cherry will be ready for harvest. Muiri being a at 1550 metres (5085′) of altitude enjoys quicker ripening.

The Muiri Estate wet mill is built on the hillside and uses clean river water  (wet processing) which is drawn up and poured into the  hopper on top of the heaped cherries, funnelling them down through a polished chute into the pulping house where the outer fruit is removed between two rotating abrasive slabs driven by a the reliable thump of a  brunswick green lister engine. As the now exposed coffee beans tumble out of the pulper into a channel of water, the floating beans are skimmed off, and the sinking denser beans pass out through a hole in the bottom spilling into the fermentation tanks were they spend the night

The next day the coffee is handled to see if the sticky sweet mucilage has broken down, leaving a rough parchment coating, once “the feel” of the coffee meets the wet mill manager, David Kiala’s approval, water will be poured into the tanks to thoroughly wash the beans. Once washed, the sluice gates are lifted allowing the coffee to spill out into the washing channels, in here the coffee slides down the gently sloping tiled channel. Wooden shunts are used to repeatedly push the coffee by hand back to the top of the channel, this repeated action separates the denser beans as the lighter beans will race back to the bottom under the force of the gentle current, whilst the denser higher quality beans will idle there way slowly down.

Sun drying of the parchment coffee on raised tables is done under careful supervision, the parchment coffee is covered up whenever their is sign of rain or the sun’s rays are too harsh. The coffee is regularly checked for moisture and once it reaches the 10-12% target level, it will be bagged up for transport to the  dry mill.