About the coffee processing

Farmers selectively hand pick the coffee and deliver to a wet mill the day of picking. At the wet mill the cherries are sorted and pulped. Red ripe cherries are separated from underripe and overripe cherries and foreign matter. It is then washed using clean river water that is filtered before disposal into seepage pits. The coffee is sun dried before being delivered to the dry mill, Highlands Coffee Mills, and then transported to Green coffee warehouses in Nairobi.
The Coffee is then sold either through the Nairobi Central Auction or directly to buyers like CCS.

ABOUT KIRURUMWE FARMERS COOPERATIVE SOCIETY LIMITED

Farmers in Kirurumwe FCS planted their first coffee trees in I950 and the Kevote factory was founded in 1957 by a group of 100 farmers. Currently the cooperative has three wet mills: Kevote , Kianjuki and Ngaindethia with a total membership of 4500 members.

The cooperative is located within Makengi location of Runyenjes sub-county, in Embu County on the southern slopes of Mount Kenya, about 150km north of Nairobi.

The cooperative is managed by an elected board of management of five democratically elected members.

Currently the cooperative has eighteen permanent staff members, overseen by a Secretary Manager. The society contracts an average of 20 casual workers during the peak season each year.

ABOUT KENYAN COFFEES

Timing is everything in the selecting of Kenyan coffees. These are some of the most sought after coffees amongst coffee buyers and if you’re not there at just the right moment, you’re liable to miss out on the cream of the crop. However the coffee sector’s consistent success in achieving relatively high prices has provided its producers with the resources to move away from the auction system and work more directly with buyers like us. Our aim these days is to work with the right partners from micro-regions that have delivered the delicious lots we’ve been sourcing from the King of Coffee Origins since 2012.

HISTORY OF THE MARKET IN KENYA

Despite its close proximity to Ethiopia, coffee cultivation did not begin until the end of the 19th century, with some sources crediting Roman Catholic Priests (Holy Ghost Fathers), while others attribute coffee’s introduction to Kenya through British colonizers.

The Kenya coffee auction was initially managed by traders based in London, which meant that farmers were forced to wait six months after the coffee was shipped before they were paid. Further depleting their returns was the fact that coffee was dry milled in London.

In 1926, the Coffee Planters’ Union was established to represent coffee farmers’ interests, which led to the establishment of cooperative and marketing systems that producers had a say in for the first time. The first Kenyan-based auction system was established in 1931 but it wasn’t until 1937 that the prominence of London-based traders was diminished. This was the year the Nairobi Coffee Exchange was opened under the control of the Coffee Board of Kenya (KPCU).

Since KPCU opened the Nairobi Coffee Exchange, the auction system has been the dominant window for selling Kenyan coffees. This is a system that has garnered relatively high prices in comparison to other coffee origins. Given the dominance of this system, specialty buyers have become used to buying from Kenya’s coffee auction and in turn marketing their Kenyan offerings by co-operative/washing station. This has meant that coffee purchasing in Kenya has been less about relationships than it has been about first “spot purchasing” by an exporter from the auction and then by an importer.

It has proven challenging and frustrating for buyers to align themselves to specific co-ops due to corruption, mismanagement issues and fluctuating quality. Over the past few years,
CCS has been exploring purchasing at the estate level with some farmers even organizing themselves into “micro-cooperatives” (±10 farmers) as a means to more firmly establish real partnerships with buyers.

OUR PARTNERS AT ORIGIN: DORMANS

Founded in 1950, C. Dorman Ltd. is one of East Africa’s most established coffee trading houses and is well-known across the industry as being a supplier of some of the best coffee Kenya has to offer. One of the main reasons Dormans is so established in terms of quality is because of its cupping team. Dormans cuppers evaluate about 2000 different lots per week and are keenly aware of the types of attributes specialty buyers are looking for.

Further, the Dormans team knows each client’s specific preferences well, curating a special selection of coffees for their clients’ visits. This team takes into account both cup profiles and washing station preferences and makes sure to present as close to repeatable lots each year as in the previous ones, on top of presenting new taste profiles and names.

Quality control extends past the cupping room and into the dry milling and export facilities. Dormans has invested in state-ofthe-art packaging equipment and materials and since the beginning, we have been able to offer our clients easy to manage and store vacuum-packed boxes. This is just one example of many as to why we return to Dormans each year.