Foundry Coffee Roasters: Kenya, Rianjangi Farmers Co Operative, Washed

We're so happy to be able to bring you this truly wonderful coffee, our first from the 2018 crop. It's the first time that we have roasted a Peaberry and so we were a little daunted at the prospect as the beans are really quite different, much smaller and more dense than we're used to.

However, it's a real pleasure to tell you that we're super proud of how this has turned out. This coffee is just blowing us away every time we brew it. Intense and complex with incredibly juicy body. There is just so much going on with this coffee and you can really zoom in to different flavours depending on how you approach the brewing. We're currently enjoying very intense orange, plum and honey notes with a dark brown sugar finish which coats the mouth and lingers for ages! This is multi-dimensional coffee, a real treat for the taste buds.

Farmers in Rianjagi planted their first coffee trees in 1950. Smallholdings or ‘shambas’ as they are known are typically small – perhaps half to one hectare in size. Coffee is grown as a cash crop and typically each farm only has around 200 trees – enough to produce about 3 sacks of coffee. Other crops are grown for family use; potatoes, mangos, avocadoes, cabbages and beans and there are usually a few cows reared for milk and several chickens for eggs and meat.

The high altitude of the region along with deep and rich volcanic soils bring about the famous high acid and deeply complex coffees that makes Kenyan coffees amongst the best in the world.