Onyx Coffee - Krampus

BEWARE: This unfriendly Holiday coffee will destroy you. Long gone are the days of sitting around the hearth, singing songs of joy with gifts under the tree. Instead, all that lies under that sad, decrepit tree is this dark-roasted Kenyan coffee. Deeply developed and smelling of sweet tobacco, this AA lot still boasts of caramelized sugars, fired-roasted citrus and a rich, thick body. Performs diabolically well as a filter or espresso.

Traditional. SL-28, SL-34. Kenya Washed.

Story
Driving upcountry to Nyeri is stunning, the driver expertly weaves their way through the traffic of Nairobi. The city can seemingly extend forever, due to the massive amount of layered housing extending from the city center. Once Nairobi fades away, you comfortably cruise the highway north towards Nyeri. On a clear day, Mount Kenya is in full snow capped view to the left, while miles and miles of pineapples pass by your right. Once you reach the base of Mount Kenya national park, well-known names of cooperatives and washing stations start to pop up. We have routinely purchased a number of AA lots from mills like Gachatha, Kamwangi, and Gathaithi. With the tumultuous season of shipments and harvesting, our large peaberry lot that we usually contract wasn’t able to make it out of the country. We decided to lean on our original relationships in Kenya to make up out Krampus offering for 2022. This season’s Krampus is a medley of all of the AA lots we found stellar for the year, roasted to a well-developed medium.

KENYA PROCESS
In the Kenya process, first, the cherries are sorted, and under-ripe/overripe cherries are removed. Once the sorting is finished, the coffee is then depulped. This is done by squeezing the cherry through a screen and removing the fruit and skin from the bean. The coffee is then left to ferment in white ceramic tiled tanks for 24 hours. Next, the coffee is stirred for a short amount of time and left to ferment for another 24 hours. After two days of dry fermentation, the coffee is washed with fresh water, removing the sticky mucilage attached to the beans that are loosened by bacteria during the fermentation. It’s then soaked in water to ferment overnight slightly. The coffee goes through sorting and density channels, which separates the lots, and then it is taken to raised beds to dry. Once it reaches 11.5-12% moisture content, the coffee is brought to conditioning bins to rest until it goes to the dry mill.

Once a coffee has been processed, dried, and then milled, it goes to a sorter that separates the beans by specific characteristics, mainly size. Coffee goes into a machine that vibrates, sending beans through different screens with different-sized holes and sorts the coffee based on size and density. This results in a more uniform coffee and cup profile. Then the coffees are auctioned based on the grade (size & density) they have.

AA (screen size 17 & 18)
The largest and most celebrated grade of Kenyan coffee. Usually the highest priced coffee on the auction from each outturn and factory. AA is is the most common grade we buy and what we normally expect from an outstanding Kenya cup.

AB (screen size 15 & 16)
This grade represents about 30% of Kenya production. While AB is usually considered lower quality than AA, we find that to not be accurate in the cup. Over the years of cupping, we have consistently found incredible AB’s that actually cup better than their more prestigious AA relatives, enforcing the idea that everything must be cupped and not have its value determined based on classification or reputation.

PB (Peaberry)
Peaberries represents about 10% of Kenya production. They are a result of a coffee cherry only producing one bean instead of two. Technically they are fused together during early stages and form one round bean instead of two half spheres. We tend to notice more fermentation tasting notes here. Winey, syrupy, and mouth coating are some of the attributes that we usually notice in the cup.

OTHER SIZES
E (large Peaberries & large chipped beans)
C (screen size 14 & 15)
TT (falls through 14)
T (small or broken pieces of beans)