Mbature Family (Kamavindi Estate)

Description

Kamavindi Estate sits at 1638-1750 masl in Embu, on the windward side of Mount Kenya. John Njiru Mbature planted it in 1958, starting with the hundred trees that colonial law then allowed and expanding once the restrictions lifted. His son Peter farms it today with his mother Hellen and his sister Gladwell. They are steadily replanting toward pure SL28, and they share what they learn with the smallholders in the surrounding village of Kibugo.

At the end of last year Jackie suggested a slow drying indoor dark room, a way to dry the coffee more gently and hold on to clarity, sweetness and structure. We started that project with the family and this year we went back, looked at the room and carried on. Kamavindi is also where we found what may be the first Geisha ever cultivated in Kenya.

This lot began as a small quantity of under ripe cherries, separated out from the estate's highest quality coffee. Rather than send them through the mill with everything else, the family held them back and tried something. The cherries rested whole for about three days, which let them carry on developing, and only then were they pulped. The sweet mucilage stayed on the parchment right through drying, where a washed lot has all of it stripped away first.

Almost everything in Kenya is washed, so a honey out of Embu is rare to begin with, and this one is rarer still. It is an experimental micro lot in the truest sense, built from the part of a harvest that would normally vanish into a lower grade. Drying it gently is exactly what the dark room was built for.

Leaving the mucilage on pulls the fruit away from the sharp currant of the washed lots and into something rounder. Red plum and dried apricot lead, honeycomb runs underneath, and caramel closes it out.

Text from Mazelab's listing.