Hundred House Coffee: Kenya - Windrush Estate - Washed

The Windrush Estate is located in Lenana Peak Kiambu County, a traditional coffee-growing region around 25km from Nairobi. It is one of Kenya’s oldest coffee-growing estates and has been operating for almost 70 years.

The cherries are grown in red volcanic soil with patches of loam and black cotton. The estate owns its own washing station, where cherries are milled with river water that’s re-circulated before it’s disposed of in seepage pits. Before the coffee is delivered to the dry mill for secondary processing, it’s dried in the sun on traditional raised beds.

The Coffee industry is a very crucial sector to the Kenyan economy. As a key export earner, it is the fifth foreign exchange earner after tourism, tea, horticulture and remittances from Kenyans in the Diaspora. The coffee industry ensures the livelihood of more than 700,000 smallholder farmers representing 3.5mil farm families organized into co-operatives and producing 60% of Kenyan coffee. The balance comes from estates that are small, medium to large in size.

Kenyan coffee contains more than 800 different aromatic compounds. Grown on well drained volcanic soils, mostly around the snowcapped Mount Kenya, Aberdare Ranges, Mount Elgon, the lowlands of Ukambani and the Kisii Highlands.

The question with Kenyan coffee has always been why the farmers are so poorly paid, despite producing the best coffee in the world. Through working with cooperatives such as this, we help towards shifting the landscape of the coffee business to be something in support of the small farmers as opposed to the multinationals.