Kenya Nyeri Mahiga Peaberry

Cupping Notes:

Mahiga makes a refined Kenya cup, with raw sugars and punchy fruit notes, peach and tart apricot, pineapple upside down cake, brown sugar, cardamom, and a bright splash of acidity.

Region: Othaya, Nyeri
Variety: SL-28, SL-34, Ruiru-11
Altitude: ~1800+ masl
Processing: Wet Process (Washed)
Certification: Farm Gate

Farm Description:

The Mahiga Factory washing station sits at 1800 meters in the Othaya constituency of Nyeri County. With just over 500 farmer members, Mahiga collects and processes the whole coffee cherry for farmer members using a disc depulping machine before fermenting the coffee in order to remove the sticky demucilage layer. After the fruit is removed, the coffee is then soaked in clean water where they are completely "washed" of any remaining fruit residue, and then dried on raised coffee drying beds. Farmers in the region grow mainly SL-28 and SL-34, with small amounts of Ruiru mixed in. Mahiga is one of several coffees we picked up from Othaya Farmers Cooperative Society (FCS), an FCS that includes an impressive amount of wet mills, 18 in all, and their work in the region dates back to the late 1950s. Coffee is processed and kept separate by process batch at the factory in order to identify quality. (See our video on Kenya processing, here). The separated batches are then run through screens in order to separate beans by size, the most common being AA (17-19 screen), AB (15-17 screen), and Peaberry, all of which are referred to as "out-turns". This is the Peaberry outturn, a natural mutation that occurs where only 1 of 2 coffee seeds inside the coffee cherry germinates, causing it to take on a small, round shape like the cherry itself. We found it to have more of a delicate fruited side than the other lots we tasted from this station.

Description from Coffee Shrub.