What Coffee Beans Does Kenya Produce? Is Kenyan Coffee Specialty Coffee? Kenyan Coffee Bean Grading: I Only Recognize AA

FrontStreet Coffee - Introduction to Kenyan Coffee

Kenyan coffee has numerous followers in the specialty coffee community, with Kenyan AA being particularly popular. Kenyan coffee features multi-layered flavors and juice-like acidity, with rich berry notes, a solid body, wonderful sweetness, lively acidity, and complex, varied flavors. High-quality Kenyan coffee also carries the intense aroma of small tomatoes, leaving a memorable aftertaste. It is a commonly used bean in specialty coffee.

Kenyan Coffee Classification

Typically, Kenyan coffee is classified as follows:

Hand-picked coffee cherries are manually sorted to remove defects such as unripe and overripe fruits, then pulped, fermented for about 36 hours, and sun-dried on metal mesh racks. After processing at the mill to remove the parchment hull, they become attractive Kenyan green beans with a blue-green appearance. These beautiful green beans are graded according to particle size, shape, and weight:

Size Grades

E: Kenya E, Elephant Bean, 18 screen size and above, includes large round beans, similar to PB, relatively rare in quantity

AA: Kenya AA, 17-18 screen size

AB: Kenya AB, 15-16 screen size, a mix of A and B grade beans (17 screen size (6.8mm) and above is A grade, 16 screen size (6.3mm) and above is B grade)

TT: Light beans separated from AA and AB by air classifiers

PB: Kenya PB, 15 screen size and above, round beans, peaberry, accounting for about 10% of Kenyan coffee

C: 12-14 screen size, and light beans from PB separated by air classifiers

T: Below 12 screen size, contains many defective beans, broken beans, and light beans

HE: Beans outside the above grades become HE (Hulled Ears)

UG: Ungraded green beans that have not undergone official standard grading processing

UG Grades

E, AA, AB, PB → UG1

C, TT, T, HE → UG2

MBUNI Grades (Natural Process, Non-Washed)

All green beans undergo gravity separation:

MH: Heavy mbuni, heavy beans, yellow, no black beans, broken pieces, dried fruit, or other defects, cupping shows typical natural flavors without taste defects

ML: Light mbuni, yellow-green, with some insect-damaged or black beans, no stale beans or broken pieces, no earthy or other bad flavors in cupping

Key Point

Kenyan coffee grading: AA, AB, C indicate the size of coffee beans

About FrontStreet Coffee

In short: FrontStreet Coffee is a coffee research house dedicated to sharing knowledge about coffee with everyone. We share everything without reservation simply to help more friends fall in love with coffee. Every month, we hold three coffee promotion events with significant discounts because FrontStreet Coffee wants to offer the best coffee at the lowest prices to more friends—this has been our mission for the past 6 years!

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