Kirinyaga Kiamugumo PB

A nice clean cup with bright, crisp acidity and a deep, berry-like undertone.

Kiamugumo factory sits in the community of Ngariama, in the Nyangeni sub-region of Kirinyaga County, on the slopes of Mount Kenya. Like most of Kenya, this is smallholder country: farmers deliver their coffee in cherry to a central washing station, where it's processed together. Temperatures hold between 12 and 25°C year-round, with the main crop picked October through January and a fly crop in April through June.

After harvest, producers bring their ripe cherries to the factory by horse or motorcycle. The coffee is washed and depulped with water drawn from the Kii River, then dried on raised African beds that let air move freely around the beans. Once it reaches 11–13% moisture, the coffee travels to the Central Kenya Coffee Mill in Karatina, Nyeri County, for grading and sorting.

Kiamugumo lies in the buffer zone around Mount Kenya National Park — an extinct volcano and, at 5,199 masl, the second-highest snow-capped peak in Africa after Kilimanjaro. Kirinyaga itself means "White Mountain" in Kikuyu, and that mountain shapes everything around it. Its glaciers feed the Kii River that washes the coffee, and cool the surrounding land to a mild 13–25°C — a privileged climate compared to much of coffee-growing Africa.