Way back in the long-ago times I took a lot of pictures on one of my biannual Kenya coffee sourcing trips. Like, a lot of pictures…
Well that was another great trip to KenyaKenya is the East African powerhouse of the coffee world. Both in the cup, and the way they run their trade, everything is topnotch.: Kenya is the East..., to see the amazing system from the small cooperative farmer, to the factory (that’s what they call a coffee millA coffee mill might mean a coffee grinder, but we usually use the term to refer to a coffee processing facility, either a Wet-Mill or a Dry Mill....), to the dry millA facility that accepts dried coffee cherry and mechanically separates the coffee bean from the dried fruit and parchment layer. The facility can be highly mechanized, as in... and preparing coffee for export.
There is no other coffee originIn coffee talk, it refers to a coffee-producing region or country; such as, "I was just at origin." Of course "Origin" for most product we use is not... with a system like this, including the Nairobi Coffee Auction that markets small lots based on cup quality, where the best coffees get the best price. We visited a lot of Kenya coffee farms but mostly cooperatives, since that is where we source the best Nyeri coffee.
Add to that the recent reforms that guarantee 80% of the sale price minus costs gets into the hands of the farmer, and you have a fantastic system to help buyers discover the best qualities.
Again, Kenya is a place I just can’t take my finger off the shutter, and nothing gets me going like photos of ripe coffee cherryOriginally coffee literature referred to the fruit of the tree as a "berry" but in time it became a cherry. It is of course neither. Nor is the.... We came to see the harvest and take photographs, and that we did. It was just my 2nd trip to this place, and the first for my travel partner this time, Jeremy Tooker of 4 barrel coffee.
I think we sorted out some details, visited a ton of factories, saw a lot of harvest and a lot of cherryEither a flavor in the coffee, or referring to the fruit of the coffee tree, which somewhat resembles a red cherry.: Either a flavor in the coffee, or... being sorted (one of many small details that makes for such high quality in Kenya coffees). Some nice images are buried in here, and a few just get by. There are some mediocre ones that are from my GPS device, and have accurate geotags. Thanks for looking! -Tom
OMG can you believe there is more! Like many more photos? If you can’t believe, don’t click here.
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