In short: I grew up picking coffee cherries on my grandfather's hillside farm in Kenya, drinking tea from a thermos, and never realizing I was learning the first half of the coffee business. Kahoa is how I'm learning the second half.
Tea in the thermos, coffee on the hill
My earliest memories are of going to the farm with my grandmother. She would pack us lunch in a thermos, and you'd think it would be coffee, since that's what we were growing. Nope. It was tea.
That's the funny thing about Kenya. It grows some of the best coffee in the world, and most Kenyans are tea drinkers. A 2022 Perfect Daily Grind report quotes an industry executive saying coffee is under 10% of what Kenyans drink, and says about 95% of the country's coffee is exported. So we drank tea to harvest coffee.
So we drank tea to harvest coffee.
Everyone got a small sack and a little bucket. Our farm is on a hill, so the coffee rows are arranged like steps, each row a step above or below the next. From a very young age, my grandmother showed us how to pick only the red cherries. Those are the ones that are ready for harvest. The bad ones, we picked too, and tossed them aside.
Of course it turned into a competition. How many cherries can you pick?
The ride to the factory
At the end of the day we hauled our cherries up to the main house, where my dad and my grandfather got them ready for the factory. (In Kenya, the coffee “factory” is where farmers' cherries are weighed and processed.) Depending on how tired we were, my dad would take me along. My sisters usually wanted to stay home.
We had an old pickup, and we would fill it with the harvest. I can't remember if that was a day's picking or a week's. The cab only had room for the driver, my dad and my grandfather, so I rode in the back with some of the workers, holding on for dear life. It was maybe five to ten miles, on a bumpy road.
At the factory, they looked at our bins, weighed them and gave us a payment slip. At the end of the month, we'd bring the slip in to get paid.
More than a chore
Honestly, I hated the work back then. When you're a kid, it feels like a chore. I had no idea it was preparing me for the biggest job of my life, which is bringing this coffee to the world.
My grandfather was a teacher and a farmer. He had nine children and plenty of grandchildren, and coffee was what gave the family its income, its wealth and its standing. A coffee farmer in Kenya is respected. I was always told it was illegal to cut down a coffee tree, and I'm not sure that has changed. That's how seriously coffee was treated.
The second half of the journey
I only ever saw the first half. My part stopped at the factory. I didn't even have my first taste of coffee until I was 21, and it wasn't until I moved to the US that I started to see the rest: grading it, roasting it, cupping it, and getting it into someone's cup.
Now I get to do that second half, and I'm excited. We grade it, roast it and cup it, and the plan is to bring it to cups across the USA and Canada, and hopefully the world, very soon.
If you'd like to taste where the story goes, start with our Kenyan single-origin coffees. You can read the rest of our story here, or learn where Kenyan coffee grows. We can't wait to take Austin by storm at the Austin Coffee Festival, with our coffee, our syrups and our Kifaru Spice Cold Brew and Nitro (our Kenyan chai-spiced cold brew). Come have a taste.