AA Guama / Kenya

Guama Coffee Factory is a processing facility in the Gichugu area of Kirinyaga County. The factory takes its name directly from the village where it is located.
In Kenya, coffee lots are named after the factory where they are processed, so the name AA Guama also comes from this village.

Kirinyaga County lies on the southern and south-eastern slopes of Mount Kenya. Around two to three hours north of Nairobi by car, it is one of Kenya's leading coffee-growing regions, alongside the neighbouring counties of Nyeri and Embu. The soil is a mixture of red volcanic earth and sandy soil, and elevations range from 1,600 to 1,800 metres. Flowering takes place from February to April, with the main crop harvested between October and December.

Guama Factory is said to have begun processing coffee in 1974. Smallholder farmers living nearby bring cherries picked from their own plots, which are brought together to form a single lot. Each household has around 200–400 coffee trees, making these plots closer in scale to gardens around the home than to large farms.

Guama Coffee Factory is operated by the Baragwi Farmers Cooperative Society. Registered in 1953, it is one of Kenya's oldest cooperatives. With around 17,000 members and 12 factories, it is said to be the largest cooperative in Kenya in terms of both production volume and membership.

We purchased AA Thimu from Baragwi FCS in 2022. Both Thimu and Guama are among the 12 factories operated by the same cooperative.

To maintain consistent quality across its 12 factories, Baragwi FCS reportedly rotates factory managers to a different factory every two years. We understand that the cooperative also employs agronomists to advise farmers and distributes compost for fertiliser as well as seedlings.
This is our second time purchasing coffee from Guama. Our first purchase was from the 2021 crop, and now, five years later, we have bought two lots harvested at different times.

This year's AA Guama consists of two lots: #019 and #049. In Kenya, lots are assigned sequential numbers, known as outturn numbers, after processing, so #019 was harvested and processed earlier. The varieties are SL28, SL34, Ruiru 11 and Batian, as with many Kenyan coffees. SL28 and SL34 were selected at Scott Agricultural Laboratories near Nairobi in the 1930s and are said to have helped establish the acidity and fruit character associated with Kenyan coffee. Ruiru 11 was released in 1985 and Batian in 2010 by Kenya's coffee research institution, both developed for disease resistance. Batian takes its name from the highest peak of Mount Kenya.

Like coffee from many Kenyan factories, Guama's coffee is washed. During harvest, farmers pick only ripe cherries by hand and deliver them to the factory that same day. At reception, underripe and damaged cherries are sorted out by hand. The cherries are then weighed before passing through a pulper to remove the fruit flesh. The coffee, now in parchment, is fermented overnight in tanks, then washed the following morning and sorted by density in washing channels.

Drying takes place on African beds over 8–14 days. At Guama, the coffee is reportedly covered with plastic sheeting during the hottest part of the day and at night to protect it from strong sunlight and dew. Consistent drying times may be one of the factors contributing to the clean cup.

Kenya's coffee trading system changed in 2023. Exporters could no longer purchase coffee directly from cooperatives; instead, coffee first goes to auction, after which exporters take samples and make their purchases. Our visit to Kenya in February 2024 came shortly after this change, at a time when people throughout the supply chain were adapting to the new rules. Two seasons have passed since then, and we feel that the sourcing process has begun to settle down a little.