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Kenya and "the decline of the greatest coffee" (2021)

un never sets on the British empire.attributed to John Wilson, 1829 During one of his “yes or no” Instagram Q&As, Scott Rao lamented the declining quality of Kenyan coffees over the last three years—a sentiment I’ve heard echoed by buyers across Europe, the US, and Australia. He kicked a different question over to me about whether cultivar or microclimate or process has the greatest cup impact, and I demurred, offering that the relationship is gestalt but that processing ultimately had the final say —invoking Kenya’s declining cup quality as an example.

Though first introduced to Kenya in 1893 by John Paterson on behalf of the Scottish Mission from seeds obtained from the British East India Company, the completion of the Ugandan Railway and arrival of European settlers ultimately led to the introduction of plantation agriculture and large-scale cultivation of cash crops like tea, wheat, sisal—and coffee. This daisy chain of microbial activity creates a situation where the pH in the tank has dropped (probably to between 5-6), the moisture level has increased (as water is liberated from the disintegrating mucilage), there is quite a bit of ethanol (because of the yeast), and there is plenty of oxygen in the environment (because these fermentations are conducted uncovered and in ambient air). But Kenyan processors introduced an extra step to interrupt this cycle halfway through—they washed the coffee (stripping away most of the food source for our fermenters, as well as the acids hanging out loose in the tank) and added fresh water (diluting the concentration of sugars thus inhibiting LAB and yeasts, decreasing availability of oxygen, and raising the pH).

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