Kenya Karinga

About The Producer

Kenya produces some of the brightest and most dynamic coffee on the planet. This beautiful lot comes from the Karinga factory, which was founded in 1983 and is a member of the Gitwe Farmers Cooperative, next to well-known stations like Karatu and Kabiru. In 2012, our founder and Director of Coffee, Caleb Nicholes, visited this cooperative and the Gatundu area on his first trip to Kenya. Gatundu is breathtaking with its steep, lush hills dotted with verdant tea and coffee fields that form a patchwork landscape, sewn from many smallholder farms that average just an acre or two of cultivated land.

The Karinga factory is managed by Samwel Muteti and serves roughly 650 members who deliver freshly harvested cherries to the central washing station from the surrounding communities in the Aberdare foothills. 

About the Coffee

Karinga has all the ingredients to produce one of the world’s best coffees: amazing terroir, unique varieties (SL28 & SL34), and meticulous processing. Cherries are picked at the peak of ripeness and sorted at the cooperative to ensure that only the sweetest fruit makes its way into the processing tanks. Elevation in this part of Kiambu is some of the highest in all of Kenya, reaching up to 2000 meters. The fermentation process here is also unique with an extended, 48-72 hour dry fermentation followed by an overnight soak before a final two weeks of drying on African raised beds.  

Why We Love It

Karinga was one of the first Kenyan coffees we put on our menu way back in 2009, and for good reason. It's a quintessentially delicious coffee offering everything one could want, deep and dark fruit tones of black currant coupled with a clean backbone of structured acidity and a long and bright aftertaste. We have been storing this lot in our deep freezer to release it at the perfect moment and that time is now. Enjoy!