Region | Thika, Kiambu
Altitude | 1650 MASL
Process | Washed
Variety | French Mission, SL-34, Ruiri 11, Batian, K7

We're suckers for a classic Kenyan here at Cloud Picker and this coffee has that bold blackcurrant juiciness which always makes us swoon!

Chania Estate is quite a historic coffee farm in Kenya. It is one of two plantations owned by the Harries family, two of the last medium-sized coffee farms left in Kenya.

Boyce Harries runs these plantations now and is the 5th generation of his family to farm in this area. In 1904, his ancestor Allen Charles Harries moved to Kenya from South Africa and founded the Karamaini Estate in the location that would become Thika municipality. Allen had to make the 30-mile trip from Nairobi with donkeys, carts and porters.

In 1926, Allen's third son Ivan moved to Chania Estate on the Chania river nearby and, after attempts to farm cattle and pineapples, coffee gradually began to gain more and more prominence as the main crop. Many of the coffee trees on this farm are around a hundred years old, some planted just before Ivan took over and some shortly afterwards.

The main variety on this farm is also one of the oldest varieties grown in East Africa: French Mission (a type of Bourbon). On top of this, Chania was the first Kenyan farm to adopt the SL-14 variety and is now one of the last farms to still cultivate these trees, celebrated for quality but overtaken in the intervening decades by more disease-resistant varieties.

The majority of the coffee on this farm is processed with the traditional washed method but Boyce has been working on a number of experimental processes and fermentations in recent years. On a cupping table with a number of different samples of these new methods, we still picked out the washed AA and peaberry lots from Chania Estate as our favourites from the produce of the two Harries plantations this year.

We cupped. We slurped. We swooned!