The green
Sack tag · Kirinyaga, Kenya
- Producer
- Karimikui washing station — 1,340 smallholder members
- Altitude
- 1,750–1,860 m
- Variety
- SL28, SL34, Ruiru 11
- Process
- washed
- Harvest
- Picked November to January, landed 4 March
- In the store
- Four sacks of 60 kg, two and a half left
On the table
blackcurrant · grapefruit pith · cane sugar
The loudest coffee on the list and the one we argue about least. Kenyan washed lots carry enough acid to survive a light roast without tasting green, so we take it to 203 °C and stop — a minute and forty-five past the crack, no more. Any longer and the blackcurrant flattens into plum, which is a perfectly nice thing to drink and not what we paid for.
The curve
Rung 1 of 4 · dropped at 203 °C
- Charge
- 193 °C
- drum, at the moment the green goes in
- Turning point
- 1:38 at 92 °C
- where the bean stops cooling and starts heating
- First crack
- 8:20
- the seed splits along its centre crease
- Drop
- 10:05
- hatch open at 203 °C, four minutes to cool
- Development
- 1:45 · 17.4 %
- crack to drop, and its share of the roast
- Weight loss
- 14.6 %
- green to roasted, water and chaff
Every batch of this lot is roasted to that shape and written down afterwards, whether it landed or not. The last eight sheets are in the roast log.
How we brewed it
Dialled on the bench, three days off the roast
Filter
60 g/L, 94 °C, 2:45 total, ground medium-coarse
Rinsed paper, bloom with twice the coffee weight for forty seconds, then two even pours. If it tastes thin, grind finer before you touch the temperature — that is the change with the shortest odds.
Espresso
18 g in, 44 g out, 28 s, 93 °C
Aim for that window and adjust the grind, not the dose. Under-extracted tastes sharp and empty; over-extracted goes dry and hollow at the finish. The middle of the two is where this lot lives.
Both recipes assume filtered water at roughly 80 ppm hardness and a brewer at room temperature. Cafés on the wholesale list get these dialled in on their own machine, with their own water, before the first delivery.