Kahiraini Revival // 7 Day Natural Anaerobic X-Variable Microlot

X-VARIABLE MICROLOT #03 | Lot KR005 | 6 oz / 170 g

Last year this was a top 5 cup of the year. This year we doubled it, and it got better.

Revival is the root of this drop.

THE PEOPLE

Kahiraini sits in Mathira, in Nyeri, on the western side of Mt. Kenya. In the nineties it was part of one of the largest cooperatives in the country. Six hundred farmers. Half a million kilos a year. Coffee the region is still known for.

Then the price collapsed. Farmers walked away from their own trees because the work stopped paying. The factory stayed open as a collection point, taking in whatever few kilos still came, and shipping them somewhere else to be processed. The buildings sat. Some were stripped for parts.

In 2021, Jack Ndirangu, chairman of the factory, and Mrs Wahito, the cooperative's secretary-manager, decided to bring it back.

Here is the part we cannot stop thinking about. They turned to natural process because the water pumps and the pulping equipment still did not work. Natural needs no water. What looked like a limitation became the method, and the method is why this cup tastes the way it does.

Jack puts it plainly: "It is by His Grace that we achieved what we have now."

Membership is back to 150 and climbing. Over 70,000 kilos of cherry. In 2023 they brought in AGnimble to digitize the operation and reach buyers directly.

SEVEN DAYS

This lot fermented seven days, sealed off from oxygen. Seven days is a long time to trust a process you rebuilt from nothing. Too short and you get nothing. Too long and you lose the whole lot. Somebody stood there and made that call, on purpose, every day for a week.

That is the variable.

WHY WE CAME BACK

Last year we took a chance on one lot and it landed in our top five cups of the year. This year we doubled the buy, and the quality jumped so far it is hard to believe it is the same factory. That is what happens when a producer gets a buyer who comes back.

AGnimble are Rep Chain partners, and they are helping us build out digital traceability, so the record of whose hands this passed through lives somewhere other than our word for it. In 2027 we are getting on a plane to Kenya to see it ourselves. Next Rep Chain visit, same relationship, one more year deep.

X is the variable. Every small decision changes what ends up in the cup. The altitude. The picker's hands. The hour the cherry came off the tree. Seven days of fermentation. A broken water pump and two people who refused to let a place die. We name the series after the unknown because the unknown is where the ingenuity lives.

Origin: Mathira, Nyeri, Kenya, 1800 MASL
Producer: Kahiraini Coffee Factory, Kahiraini Farmers Co-op
Chairman: Jack Ndirangu | Secretary-manager: Mrs Wahito
Process: Natural anaerobic, 7 day fermentation
Varietals: SL28, SL34, Ruiru 11
Sourced through: Nsidibe Etim, AGnimble

We taste: Honeydew melon. Persimmon. Kiwi. Muscadines. Freeze-dried strawberries. M&M confectioner candies. Peanut butter cookies. Dates. Cacao nibs. Bright, juicy, bouncy, deep.

We grew up being told Arabica was from Arabia. This bean's true name is Ethiopica, and this lot brings that ancestral heat back home to the cup.

Brew it right. 188F. 1:15. Three to four minutes.

Limited. Subscribers get the first 100 bags. Whatever is left comes to the shop and the site. Kahiraini does not come back every season.

Roasted at Cxffeeblack, 3386 Bowen Avenue, Memphis TN 38122.

God don't make no junk, and the coffee don't need no cream.