Note sull'episodio
Kenya grows Arabica that trades under the Colombian Milds category, a market shorthand for high-quality washed arabica. Its highland plateaus around Mount Kenya, the Aberdare Range, Kisii, Nyanza, Bungoma, Nakuru, Mount Elgon, and the Taita Hills sit between 1,400 and 2,000 meters on red volcanic soil rich in phosphoric acid, and cool nights slow the cherries' ripening so beans pack in sugars and acids that roast into blackcurrant and cocoa notes. Despite bordering Ethiopia, Kenya came late to coffee: one record credits French Holy Ghost Fathers bringing trees from Réunion Island to mission farms near Nairobi around 1893, another the British around 1900. For decades African farmers were barred from growing it, pushing them onto European estates to earn money for taxes.
The 1933 Coffee Act created the Coffee Board, and the Swynnerton Plan of the early 1950s gave families legal land titles and lifted the ban on African cash crops. Today about 70 percent of Kenyan coffee comes from smallholder farms, roughly 150,000 farmers supply cooperatives, and the industry supports around six million livelihoods. Yet output has fallen from about 130,000 tons a year in the late 1980s to about 40,000 tons in 2011 to 2012, as Nairobi sprawls into prime coffee land in Kiambu County and developers offer lump sums that volatile prices cannot match.
- Colonial officials justified the ban by claiming small African plots would spread diseases such as coffee leaf rust.
- A single cooperative union in Kipkelion serves more than 40,000 farmers who hand-pick cherries for central washing factories.
- Cherries are depulped, fermented in tanks, washed in fresh water channels, and dried on raised mesh beds.
- Buyers cup hundreds of samples before bidding on lots at the Nairobi Coffee Exchange, a major source of foreign currency.
- Exchange sales in the 2022 to 2023 coffee year were $127.8 million, a 43.8 percent drop from the year before.