Revered African Coffee Regions: Kenya Coffee Beans - The Eden Garden of Love

FrontStreet Coffee - An Introduction to Kenyan Coffee

Kenyan coffee grows mostly at altitudes of 1,500–2,100 meters and is harvested twice a year. Its defining trait is a pronounced fruit aroma — citrus above all — delivered in multi-layered flavors with a juice-like acidity, notes of grapefruit and wine, and a moderate body. It is a favorite single origin among many coffee professionals.

Kenyan coffee is grown by smallholder farmers. After harvest, they deliver fresh cherries to cooperative washing stations, where the washed and dried coffee is returned to the cooperatives as "parchment coffee" (beans still in their endocarp). Everything is pooled, and growers are paid average prices according to actual quality. This trading system generally works well and is fair to both growers and consumers.

The Kenyan government takes its coffee industry extremely seriously — cutting down or destroying coffee trees is illegal. Kenyan coffee attracts world-class premium buyers, and no other country grows, produces, and sells coffee quite the way Kenya does. All beans are first purchased by the Coffee Board of Kenya (CBK), which evaluates and grades them before selling at weekly auctions. The Board acts only as an agent: it collects samples and distributes them to buyers, who assess price and quality for themselves.

Premium Kenyan coffee has a bright sheen, a delicious taste, and a faint wine aroma. The auction system also serves the needs of blenders: lots are typically small (3–6 tons each), and samples carry the grower's identification so buyers can evaluate them directly. After the auction, exporters package coffee according to the flavors, qualities, and quantities each blender requires, giving blenders great flexibility. Quality-conscious Germans and Scandinavians have long been steady buyers of Kenyan coffee.

Globally, the growth of Kenyan coffee has been striking. Exports ran at 800,000 bags in 1969–1970; by 1985–1986, production had climbed to 2 million bags. Output has since stabilized at around 1.6 million bags, with an average yield of about 650 kilograms per hectare. Before the recent surge in coffee prices, Kenyan coffee had been rising steadily — prices in 1993–1994 were 50% higher than twelve months earlier, driven mainly by growing demand.

Kenyan coffee won further fame through the Hollywood film "Out of Africa." The heroine Karen, played by Meryl Streep, is a writer and coffee plantation owner. Many viewers still remember the film's touching scenery and magnificent sunsets, but even more unforgettable is Karen's dream of owning a coffee farm in Africa.

Perhaps the meaning of Kenyan coffee lies in exactly that — a beautiful yearning for life.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

Washed processing is a water-based tradition in which cherries are floated, pulped, fermented in tanks to strip the mucilage, then washed, dried, and hulled. The long soak consumes much of the bean's simple sugars while sharpening its organic acids, so washed coffees express the bean's own aromatics with a bright, clean, refreshing acidity — a profile Kenya has mastered like no one else. FrontStreet's Kenya "Cherry Tomato" is one of the best-known examples: it uses Kenya's signature double fermented wash, repeating the washing step — flotation, soaking, scrubbing off residual mucilage, soaking again, then drying, hulling, and storage. Those repeated rinses push the fruit-juice quality to the extreme, yielding aromas of cherry tomato, dried plum, snow pear, black plum, and yellow sugar with a sweet-tart, juicy mouthfeel that coffee enthusiasts adore.