Tegu is a coffee washing station, a wet mill, a coffee factory. Well, it's all three. A "factory" is a wet mill where the coop members bring coffee cherry for pulping, fermenting, washing, drying. It's not the factory as we might imagine it. Small washing stations are aligned with a particular "society" which is what they call a cooperative in Kenya. Tegu is part of Tekangu Farmers Cooperative Society (FCS) which combines the names for their 3 factories: Tegu, Karagoto and Ngunguru. I visited them this season and the previous as well, since we have bought many small lots over time from Tekangu. The quality from Tegu has been remarkable. What I saw at Tegu was excellent sorting of cherry at the mill by each picker, before they submit the coffee to be processed. Over-ripe and immature cherries are culled out. They have a system where pickers are graded as A or B. "A" pickers are those who have been proven to deliver well-selected and sorted cherry, and they are invited to submit coffee on the "A" day, when a higher price is paid. "B" pickers are still yet-to-be-proven, or have had more immatures and over-matures in their bags. They must come on the lowly "B" day and are paid less. Maybe it seems harsh, but there is no better way I have seen to create an incentive for quality harvesting, rather than mindless strip-picking of the coffee tree. (By the way, this A and B picker system has nothing to do with the AA or AB grade, that refers to screen size of the coffee at the dry mill only. AA, AB and PB all comes from the exact same lot submitted to the dry mill, and is separated only by the coffee size screening equipment). This review is for the final lot of AA grade Tegu, which was shipped in vacuum packs. Like other top AA lots, the competition was fierce for these coffees, and the crop very small. We paid record prices to get great coffees like this, hence the final cost.

The dry fragrance of Tegu is sweet malt, dried apricot and caramel. The darker roasts have increasingly potent brown sugar note and chocolate laced with clove and nutmeg. The wet aroma has a floral accent in the light roast, hop flower, and fig newton cookie in darker roasts. At Full City the break has dark caramel and figgy pudding. The cup has a fruited character: currant, bright cherries with a hard-candy sweetness in the finish. Let this coffee rest after roasting! I really can't state enough what even one more extra day of rest does for this coffee, the wine-like and jammy acidity is fully integrated into the syrupy body and there's more complexity to the sweetness, with caramel and vanilla present at Full City. Dark berry notes that weren't present at 12 hours of rest really emerged at 24 hours rest, and were even more intense at 48 hours. City+ is where I got this coffee to sing for me, the body is nice and the sweet melon is intense. This is not the most citric or acidic Kenya, and some will find it less compelling as such. I think the balance, body and depth are welcome qualities.