Kirimiri

Picture two dishevelled coffee professionals in the early hours of a Thursday winter morning, finding out no one was going to come to a cupping they were both excited about. Finding a teeny tiny corner of the roastery to taste the pleasure that comes but once a year; First Crop’s pre-shipment Kenyans. That was Corben and Will, stoked to be the only two to make the call on some coffee bangers. Kirimiri happened to be one of the highlights and a few months later, with only one unfortunate shipping delay, here we are. Kirimiri factory is located at around 1785 MASL in a small settlement named Kanjain, Embu County. The closest town, Mukuuri is about 150km north east of Nairobi. Between these two drop pins lies Kirinyaga County, which we were lucky enough to have some coffee from last harvest. Kirimiri Factory is part of the New Kirimiri Farmers' Cooperative Society, which has around 800 farming members, each with around 250 trees. Quick maths, around 200,000 trees producing beautiful red cherries during harvest. The fruit is handpicked and splayed out to spot any under/overipes at the patio of the wet mill. The cherry is then poured into the pulping hopper, where fresh water from the Kirimiri-Ena river is also passed through the polished chutes into the pulping machines. More fresh water is then channelled into a basin where floating, now exposed, beans can be removed. Only the denser higher quality beans will then fall into a fermentation tank, where they get tucked up for the night to ferment. The next day the coffee is released through a sluice and ferried by yet more fresh water, with the lighter beans falling quicker down the tiled channel, and the denser ones can be syphoned off the top to be separated, often denoting the quality. It is then sun dried until dry enough to be shipped to the dry mill. Big cheers to First Crop for importing this certified banger.