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

Kenya has legions of devoted followers in the specialty coffee world, and Kenyan AA is the darling of them all. Kenyan coffee is famed for its multi-layered flavors and juice-like acidity: rich berry notes, a solid body, wonderful sweetness, lively acidity, and complex, ever-shifting flavors. Top lots also carry that unmistakable aroma of small tomatoes and a lingering, memorable aftertaste. It's a staple on any specialty coffee menu.

Kenyan Coffee Classification

Kenyan coffee is typically classified as follows:

Hand-picked cherries are manually sorted to remove defects — unripe and overripe fruit among them — then pulped, fermented for about 36 hours, and sun-dried on metal mesh racks. After the mill removes the parchment, the result is the attractive blue-green Kenyan green bean. Those beans are then graded by particle size, shape, and weight:

Size Grades

E: Kenya E, "Elephant bean," screen 18 and above; includes large round beans, similar to PB, and relatively rare.

AA: Kenya AA, screen size 17-18.

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

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

PB: Kenya PB, screen 15 and above; round peaberry beans, about 10% of Kenyan coffee.

C: Screen size 12-14, plus light beans separated from PB by air classifiers.

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

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

UG: Ungraded green beans that have not gone through official standard grading.

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, free of black beans, broken pieces, dried fruit, or other defects; cups with typical natural flavors and no taste defects.

ML: Light mbuni — yellow-green, with some insect-damaged or black beans but no stale beans or broken pieces, and no earthy or other off-flavors in the cup.

Key Point

In Kenyan grading, AA, AB, and C describe bean size — nothing more. The grade tells you the screen size, not the quality of the harvest itself, which is why the same AA lot can taste wildly different from farm to farm.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Kenyans wash nearly everything, but if the natural-process side of coffee fascinates you, FrontStreet Coffee's natural lots show what sun-drying can do — the oldest processing method in coffee, in which ripe cherries dry whole in the sun so the sugars of the fruit pulp infuse the bean, giving higher body and rich, mature fruit tones. The FrontStreet Yirgacheffe Red Cherry natural uses only fully red, fully ripe cherries, dried on raised beds 27-30 days away from the ground, turned regularly for even drying; medium-light roasted, it layers elegant florals and bright acidity over tropical fruit, a full fermented sweetness, and honeyed depth.

Or try the celebrated FrontStreet Huakui natural from Sidamo's Hambella: grown at extreme altitude in superb conditions and traditionally sun-dried for 21 days on raised beds, it offers faint fermentation, florals, citrus, and mango — much denser and more complex than a washed lot, with honey sweetness, cocoa undertones, a whisper of spice, thick body, and a long finish.