THE CHALLENGE
Purchasing a Kenyan micro-lot often means bidding for it in the country’s central auction system.
Buying Kenyan coffee through the auction each year can make it incredibly difficult for you to purchase coffees from the same producer year upon year. This also means that building long-standing relationships with farmers in Kenya can be difficult. Kenya’s “Second Window” has the potential to change this.
The “Second Window” was founded in 2006 and enables private trading directly between coffee producers and international buyers like you, instead of going through the central auction system. The “Second Window” was founded to help smallholding farmers but due to lack of resources, it still remains difficult for farmers to produce and promote good quality coffees that don’t end up lost in the sea of coffees headed to auction.
THE LOCATION
In partnership with Haron Wachira from Akili Holdings Ltd., we have refurbished Thunguri Coffee Factory in Kirinyaga County, Mount Kenya (just east of Nyeri County). In the past, the coffee factory existed to serve the Wachira family and a few of their neighbors who grow coffee in the region. While the Akili Group is not solely focused on coffee, we share the same vision of working with small-scale farmers to improve their coffee production, access to markets, and the price paid for the coffee they produce. Long Miles Kenya will be a long-term partnership with the Wachira family, and the communities of coffee growers in the Mount Kenya region.
THE PLAN
We will work directly with coffee farmers in the region, building long-term relationships with these communities. As we listen to and learn from the coffee farming communities and coffee factories in the area, we will begin to craft and implement a strategic production plan based off of close to a decade’s worth of experience in Burundi. Coffee farmers will be offered training in better agricultural practices to encourage future generations of sustainably grown Kenyan coffee. Back at the coffee factory, we will focus on implementing quality control protocols built specifically for Kenya, guaranteeing you exciting and well thought out micro-lots (mostly of the SL-28 variety).
You will be able to build long-term relationships with coffee farmers in the region, purchasing consistently high-quality coffees and recognizable micro-lots directly from Long Miles instead of through the country’s traditional central auction system. It might sound crazy, but we believe the deeper our collective investment into a community goes, the better the coffee tastes.
We’ve also been thinking about the possibility of starting a Long Miles Coffee Farm in Western Kenya for a while. After looking for over a year, we’ve found a piece of land at 2200masl, close to the edges of a national forest park in Western Kenya. It’s here that we’ll soon be planting our first SL-28 coffee trees, pursuing regenerative farming practices. We’ll continue the works of our reforestation project, Trees For Kibira, in this region, planting out green belts of trees, and encouraging the practice of shade-grown coffee.
THE HARVEST
During a year [2020] in which travel was seemingly impossible, our founders, head of quality control, managing director, and story team were able to visit and connect with a community of coffee growers in Kirinyaga County who are committed to producing high quality Kenyan coffee. We’ve sown the seeds for our Coffee Scout program, and will soon start building a team of young agronomists whose mission will be to work alongside our partner coffee growers, empowering them with best farming practices and any support that they might need to produce quality coffee.
In our inaugural coffee season (a low harvest year for coffee growers around the country), we collected and processed a small volume of cherry from twenty partner coffee farmers living around Thunguri Coffee Factory, modelling how we produce micro-lots in Burundi. While our inaugural harvest season in Kenya may seem low, building trust within a new community takes time. We’re still listening to, learning from, and getting to know the communities of coffee farming families in the region.
Our team also visited and worked on quality control measures with other farmer-owned coffee washing stations as well as private estates in the region, and cupped through the coffees that they produced this season. Our intention is always to produce our own coffee, but in these early days of establishing Long Miles Kenya we will also be sharing the coffees produced by other coffee washing stations that we enjoyed tasting on the cupping table.