Kenya Nyeri Mahiga AB

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 easily removed, the seeds are then soaked in clean water where they are completely "washed" of any remaining fruit residue, and then dried on raised 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 Farmer's 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 day or even weekly deliveries at the factory in order to identify quality. The separated batches are then run through screens in order to separate beans by size, the most common being AA (17/64" to 19/64" screen), AB (15/64" to 17/64" screen), and Peaberry, which are refered to as "outturns". This is the AB outturn. See our video on Kenya post-harvest processing, here.