Visiting Great Rift in Nandi County

Update from @October 31, 2024

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Our Head of Coffee Dave is visiting Kenya coffee producer Lot 20 along with a couple of our roasting partners to meet with co-founder Sidney Kibet and learn more about Kenyan coffee production.

Summary

Now nearing the end of their trip, the group pay a visit to another coffee producer that Lot 20 work with: Great Rift in Nandi County.

Great Rift are a well established organisation with some interesting projects in the works. The group met up with CEO Zakiya-Rose Muge, who showed Dave the 11.7 acres of coffee trees that make up the Priory farm lots of coffee that we source.

The group were also shown an example of grafting: SL28 rootstock grafted to a ruiru 11 sapling, the ideas being for the base of the tree to have Ruiru 11’s resilience to disease and climate, while baring the better cupping cherries of the SL28.

After cupping some of the resulting coffee of this graft, Dave described the taste as ‘bloody tasty. Dare I say a little blackcurrant in there’.

Photos

From Left to right: Zakiya-Rose, Barbara, Luca, Collin, and Dave stand by the Great Rift Coffee sign.

Zakiya and Dave pose within the Priory farm of Ruiru 11 trees which Omwani receives coffee from.

The drying beds at The Great Rift, currently drying some naturally processed cherries.

The fermentation zone, stocked with sealed blue barrels for anaerobic fermentation.

A freshly-grafted coffee plant, with the root and base of Ruiru 11, and the top of an SL 28 varietal.

The Great Rift nursery, where thousands of Batian varietal coffee seedlings are being raised until ready for planting.