Kenya Othaya Gatuyaini AB

This coffee is from the Gatuyaini Factory, a washing station more or less. Nothing industrious about it, except for the machinery to wash and depulp coffee cherries! Gatuyaini is one of 19 washing stations that make up the Othaya Farmer's Coopertive Society, a coop-run organization, one of the older ones I might add. Othaya started in the mid-1950s, ballooning from 250 original members to 15,000 strong today. Altitude of the washing station is just shy of 1900 meters, and you mostly see SL-28 and SL-34, along with a little Ruiru mixed in. We keep returning to the societies who regularly produce some of the best Kenya coffees we see, and each year we come across coffees new to us - like Gatuyaini - and this list continues to grow. This is an "AB" separation, which denotes the size of the beans. All coffee in Kenya is sorted by size using large industrial screening machines. There's a grading name attached to each size range, "AA" for the largest beans, and in this case, "AB", which means that the beans fall between 15/64" and 17/64". Honestly, this doesn't always equate to a quality difference in the cup, but it does affect the price. AA's typically command the highest prices. And while we bought plenty of AA coffee this year, this AB lot from Gatuyaini won us over! See our video on Kenya post-harvest processing, here.