First and Foremost - Hello to those of you reading these! Kim had asked me to post some blogs, as it helps website engagement and apparently gets you in with Google. If it’s not obvious, I’m no writer. I am a poorly educated American who happens to love coffee. These things that I’m documenting here are mostly for our own data logging purposes. There is a ton of information on roasting out there, and necessary or not, this is our humble wheatgrass-pilled drum roaster addition to the pile.
For our second Kenya season, I really wanted to go hard. Kenyan coffee is some of Kim and I's favorite and each year provides a great opportunity to delve deeper into one of the most famous coffee regions.
Due to logistic difficulties with my other job, I decided to source only from our friends at Cafe Imports Australia for this African coffee season. I feel that Claudia does a fantastic job for them, and our friends at the Australia office made it very easy to get great coffees even though I was going to be out of the country for these releases. Cafe Imports also gives us the rare opportunity to evaluate coffees with our roasters friends in USA & Europe as well, as they get access to some of the exact same lots.
All of these lots were sourced and exported to Cafe Imports Australia with the help of Dormans Coffee. Dormans is a coffee exporter and roasting company that operates in East Africa. Established in 1950, they are one of the most important coffee businesses in Africa. Working with importers all over the world, they aim to supply the best quality Kenyan coffee as well as establish long lasting partnerships with cooperatives and coffee producers. Cafe Imports would then be cupping the coffees that Dormans has sourced, in order to decide what to offer their list of clients around the world.
I sampled about 20 lots for this season. Deciding on these 6... right before getting appendicitis, having surgery, and then leaving the country for a 3.5 months. We had selected the coffee to be drawn down over two months of releases. This was a planned schedule so we could have 1 month with featuring well known factories, followed by a second drop with 3 lots from smaller estates.
Overall, I think this seasons Kenya project went really well, the roasts came out great and we learned a lot about sourcing and some different producing regions in Kenya.
The first three coffees were, Gachatha AA, Gititu AA, and a Peaberry from the Kii factory. Gachatha is standout among coffee geeks like us, being well promoted by Tim Wendleboe in the early 2010’s. Followed by the Kii PB, which was also promoted by another nordic roaster in the 2010s this being Denmarks Coffee collective. Gititu, especially the Kiambu region, is one we’ve loved from the NYC roasters Sey.
At the data gathering stage, Cafe Imports had some conflicting information about Gititu on the documents concerning that coffee. I was able to reach out to Dormans directly to get information about Gititu and pinpoint that this year the full allocation purchased by Cafe Imports was indeed from the Kiambu Facility, and not from one managed by Agouti FCS in Nyeri. Dormans were extremely responsive and helpful, so if youre a roaster looking for more information, don’t hesitate to reach out.
This covers 3 distinct growing regions in Kenya for us. Gachatha Factory is located in Nyeri, Kii is in Kirinyaga, but just on the border with Embu. And Gititu, this coming from Kiambu further south closer to Nairobi. I found all of these coffees to express their origin well in the cup. The coffees were quite low moisture, resulting in fast roasts with low weight loss even with good development.
One of my main ideas behind these roasts, was to front load the heat and cut it hard before first crack. These are bigger screen size beans, with low-ish moisture content. The mindset was, bigger beans = more energy to roast, but I didn’t want to drastically extend the roast times.
Here is a production roast for Gachatha AA. Its hard to pick a favorite amongst these 6 coffees, but this one was definitely a standout. It had huge fruit flavors you expect, but with a buttery body as well. Extremely delicious, and like all these AA’s it responded well to a ton of heat up front in the roast.
Gachatha was the one of the most “normal” weight loss for the production roast, landing in the zone of 10-10.5% weight loss for the filter roasts. I’ll attach an Omni profile below, with a longer, slower roast, we were landing just under 12% weight loss for these few Omni batches that we did. We ended up going with a shorter development time on this one, 20 seconds is normal for us, but I feel that Kenyas taste slightly better acidmaxxed so we were doing about 20-25 seconds.
As always, the goal with our Omni profiles is to get a slower, more developed coffee, while still remaining analogous to our roast style. In order to achieve this we do things like lower peak burner, charge lower, and extend development while cutting the gas even more after first crack. You can see a crash in the ROR after first crack in the graph above, and this is a well known behavior for Kenyan coffees, although we try to control it. This coffee was dropped at the bottom of the dip, so it wouldn’t have any sort of ‘baked’ flavors.
Next up we have the Peaberry from Kii coffee factory. This is the light roast profile, and the biggest difference in this roast profile compared to the AA’s is the charge temp and peak burner. My reasoning behind this is because its a more dense coffee, in terms of bulk density. And the beans are basically spherical.
Analysing the bulk densities showed that a 1200g batch of an AA took up about the same mass inside the roasting drum as 1300g of Peaberry. We wanted to try to match these numbers, so we could utilise a similar profile and get good results. We have since ended up scrapping this method, as 1200g batch sizes work so much better for our waste management. 1300g was leaving too much coffee left over after packaging, and the results weren’t discernibly better.
The roast above is a 1200g roast, charged hotter, but with a lower peak burner power than the AA’s because it has more density, and the overall roast was just slightly slower. This coffee was one of the drier ones, landing at a consistent 9.4 - 9.6% weight loss for the production batches. It had a more tropical aspect in comparison with the others, yet still had an intense buttery texture.
You can see an omni roast below, again demonstrating a crash about 30 seconds into first crack. This didn’t worry us though, as the coffee tasted great.
Gititu was by far the driest for these coffees. It was also maybe my favorite of all the lots from these 2 releases. The floral and tea like qualities, balanced with the sour cherry and wine-y vibes, it was definitely a winner for me.
I feel like the low moisture content is also what drove it to roast so much faster than the other coffees we had this season. It just flew through the roast, but the end cup was perfectly developed with huge acidity. If anything I felt like we could take this coffee lighter, but in the end the way it expressed itself was unique and awesome.
This one was giving us 8.75-9% weight loss for these filter production roasts, which is on the lower side for us, but without any cereal or hints of underdevelopment. It just wanted to be yeeted. We tried a profile roast with a longer development, but in the end got some roasty notes that we think didn’t provide any extra acidity.
It was after the first half of this release that we realised providing the Omni option on the website was resulting in some wastage on our back end. The fans of our style don’t really order it, so having to roast an entire batch just to sell one bag was not ideal. For this reason we have switched to offering Omni roasts to our wholesale partners only. Below is an omni roast of Gititu, which even with a slower roast and nearly 1 min of dev time is barely breaking 7 minutes.
For the second half of our Kenya drop, I wanted to showcase lots from some small estates alongside the three big factories. Bnivaans Estate & Wendi Wega were my favorites among the options available from CIA this year. Another PB and 2 more AA’s, this time around having more nuanced flavors, Bnivaans in particular being slightly more floral in the aroma.
Bnivaans was an interesting one, this one I also reached out to Dormans to get more information about, as the importers webpage just had the producers name as “Bob”…In the end we got a wealth of info about this coffee and the Estate. Again, shoutout to Dormans for being so helpful. The AA's floral notes we interpreted as Pecan, with vinous vibes and a high acid, it is a very cool coffee. The roast above was 9.83% WL even with a 26s development time. This along with the Gititu from Kiambu ranked among my faves for the season.
Below is a the profile for the PB from the same estate. We found this one was a slightly more uneven with sorting, having some normal beans that made it through the screen. Still this one presented more tropical, and was a delight to drink. Even though we yeeted this one, it still showed no signs of underdevelopment. 9.23% WL on the roast below, which was standard for this coffee.
Mwendi Wega’s AA, the 2nd one from Kirinyaga out of our lineup. This one was really well balanced, the Cranberry + Lime combo is classic Kenya to me, although there was a great sweetness here as well. Again, this one was on the drier side, with 20s of development getting us 9.22% WL on the roast profile below.
Overall, we learned a lot of things from this release. Don’t be scared to go overboard with your tasting notes if your tasting specific things. Its more of a guide, representative of your own palate. As a big coffee consumer myself, I can generally get a vibe of how I’ll like a coffee based off the notes but its not always something that I expect to turn up.
Charging based on volume had a good impact on how we view heat transfer, but in the end sticking with a consistent batch size is better for retail management.
Drier coffees respond well to our roast style, giving big acidity and fruity flavors. Free of graininess or vegetal notes, even with extremely short development times.
If you’ve scanned through this to check out the curves or even just because you’re curious, we appreciate you. Its always a work in progress! In the end, we want to step out of the way of the coffee and let it do the talking. The end result is a cumulation of our palate guiding us along with the heat transfer capabilities of our machine, and our skills as roasters.