Ichamama AA // KENYA

FROM THE IMPORTER

 This is a low-intervention, double-washed coffee from Nyeri, Kenya, produced at the Ichamama cooperative washing station by smallholder members of the Othaya Cooperative Society.

Counting its membership at over a thousand farming families, Ichamama is by far the largest cooperative factory under the Othaya Cooperative Society’s umbrella. Coffee from Ichamama has been a part of the Crown Jewel program since its inception in 2016 and made consecutive appearances on our menu for a number of years, in part due to the washing station’s participation in Royal’s “Red Cherry” program which paid premiums for additional sorting and quality separations. The factory is named after a river, which originates from the nearby Karama Hill.  

Othaya Farmers Cooperative Society, the umbrella organization that includes Ichamama Factory, is one of Kenya’s larger societies, with 19 different factories and more than 14,000 farmer members across the southern Nyeri region. Othaya Farmer Cooperative Society is one of the key member societies of the Kenya Cooperative Coffee Exporters (KCCE) organization. KCCE is a historic organization of almost 4,000 individual cooperatives. The group was formed in 2009 with the express goal of managing marketing and exporting operations internally and cooperatively, as opposed to contractually with third parties. The economics of smallholder systems are consistently difficult everywhere in the world, and in Kenya in particular the number of individual margins sliced off an export price before payment reaches the actual farms is many, leaving only a small percentage to support coffee growth itself. Most often this dividend arrives many months after harvest. KCCE, by managing more of the value chain itself, can capture a greater margin on behalf of the farms.  

Kenya is of course known for some of the most meticulous at-scale processing found anywhere in the world. Bright white parchment, nearly perfectly sorted by density and bulk conditioned at high elevations is the norm, and a matter of pride even for generations of Kenyan processing managers who prefer drinking Kenya’s tea, which is abundantly farmed in nearby Muranga county. Ample water supply in the central growing regions has historically allowed factories to wash, and wash, and soak, and wash their coffees again entirely with fresh, cold river water.