Good morning and welcome to today’s review of S&W Craft Roasting’s Kenya Thiririka Ndundu AA. Not only is this a fun coffee name to say, but I’m excited for a Kenyan coffee because it has been forever since I had one. Slurp!!!
Purchase this coffee directly for $16.55/16oz
S&W CRAFT ROASTING KENYA THIRIRIKA NDUNDU AA
S&W Craft Roasting was started by Nick and Charlie, two homeroasters located in the tiny town of Coatesville, IN, who decided to turn their hobby into a business. They got their start a year or two before KC Coffee Geek in 2015 and they’ve quickly become one of my favorite roasters of all time. I have yet to taste a bad coffee that they’ve sourced and roasted and with prices between $15-$16.50 per pound (16 ounces) their value is unmatched. With a simple website and bag labels, everything you spend with S&W Craft Roasting goes back into the business and this also helps keep costs down so you can enjoy top-notch coffee without breaking the bank. Right now, S&W Craft Roasting has a fantastic selection of 11 coffees from Brazil, Ethiopia, Colombia, Guatemala, Kenya, Peru and Malawi, so every coffee taste is covered!
I feel like it has been forever since I tasted a Kenyan coffee last, and over the last few years they just haven’t been ubiquitous like they were before. I’m not sure if that has to do with the pandemic and supply chain issues, some other factors, or if it’s something my brain made up, but it seems like Kenyan coffees are a little harder to find these days. So, I’m super excited to jump into this one! As usual, I am keeping my palate free and clear of bias by avoiding the labels and websites for this coffee, so I will share my tasting notes below and then give you all the details of the coffee afterward. All I can say about this coffee right now is that the “AA” in the name means it has the largest beans in the Kenyan screening/sorting method, size AA. In Kenya and some other East African countries they separate coffee beans by size. There is no quality difference when it comes to size, but the uniformity looks awesome in the bag and may have some advantage for really precise grinding needs, possibly. It’s more of a tradition at this point. In the Kenyan system, what I’ve seen the most are AA, AB, and P, the last of which is “peaberry” or those little mutant beans where there is only one seed in the coffee cherry, instead of two, so they come out round or football shaped instead of having the half-dome shape of a normal coffee seed. In any case, this bag from S&W features large, uniform beans that look great.
I’m using my usual pourover setup for this coffee, which is a 1:16.5 ratio of 22g of coffee to 363g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper. The Origin is a flat bottom dripper like a Kalita Wave and used Kalita’s 155 size Wave filters. I pulse pour my water through a Melodrip to minimize agitation during brewing and my grinder is an Orphan Espresso Lido 3. This coffee got a 30 second bloom and a total brew time, bloom included, of 3:10.
The aroma from this cup is really nice and inviting. I’m getting warm brown sugar tones and soft hints of molasses.There’s the slightest hint of raisin here for me, too. Taking a sip at a pretty warm temperature still my palate is greeted with a medium-bodied coffee that is sweet, has some of that raisin in the flavor I was getting in the aroma, and then morphs into a lot of citrus tones in the aftertaste. The coffee is definitely warmer than my usual starting temperature for drinking and enjoying a high quality selection, but I like to sample coffees through their whole range of temperatures and experience how they open up and change throughout. As the cup opens up, this is turning into exactly the type of coffee I love from Kenya. At a cooler drinking temperature, this has “condensed” medium-heavy body with absolutely beautiful flavors. There is a sweet base here followed by a little bit of raisiny notes for me still, and then soft, sweet and tangy citrus comes flooding in. I’m getting orange notes here as well as some grapefruit juice in the mid-sip and some more grapefruit peel/pith in the aftertaste. As the cup continues to cool that raisin note is departing, too, and I’m getting loads of grapefruit and orange in this coffee. The finish and initial aftertaste has some lemon candy showing up and the citrus lingers on my palate between sips for what seems like forever. Toward room temperature, the acidity in the cup feels like it’s getting a bit sharper, but this is exactly the coffee I want from Kenya. Big flavors, huge citrus tones and bright, acid-forward, yet still balanced and easy-drinking. This coffee does it all and is the prototype Kenyan coffee experience, for me!
About the Coffee
S&W give us tasting notes of, “black grape, followed by heavy nectarine and plum, plus a hint of ginger in the finish.” So, my palate went straight to completely different flavors compared to Nick and Charlies’… maybe I’ve been drinking too much ‘spro lately and I’m out of practice with filter coffee, although taste is subjective and experiential, so I’m not too worried about it. Although I would love to taste what they tasted in this coffee, too! This coffee is a lot of SL-28, SL-34, Ruiru-11 and Batian varieties grown and processed by members of the Thiririka Farmers Cooperative Society. Coffee grows around 1800masl there and this is a fully washed coffee in the Kenyan style. The Thiririka society was founded in 1996, named after a river in the area, and “ndundu” means agreement, so the name of the co-op solidifies the agreement of the community to work together. Like a lot of African countries, coffee in Kenya is often grown by smallholder farmers whose yield wouldn’t be enough to sell on their own, so they work in large cooperatives like this one. During harvest, the members bring their coffees to the “factories” where coffee is collected, weighed, purchased, sorted, and further processed to be sold to the market. S&W’s site has a lot more detailed info about the society and their practices, and you can find that here.