Vibrant Coffee Roasters Kenya Kariru AB

Let’s head back to Africa today with a Kenyan selection from Philadelphia’s Vibrant Coffee Roasters! It’s Friday and everyone has things to do before the weekend, so let’s slurp right in!

Vibrant Coffee Roasters

Purchase this coffee directly for $20/10oz

Other reviews in this series: Ethiopia Qirtira Goyo 


VIBRANT COFFEE ROASTERS KENYA KARIRU AB

Vibrant Coffee Roasters is a newcomer to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania’s coffee roasting scene, looking like they got their start earlier this year. Vibrant claims Function Coffee Labs in Philly as their “sister company” and that’s the extent of what I know about Vibrant, other than that I sure did enjoy their Qirtira Goyo from Ethiopia that I reviewed recently! This morning I’m taking a sip of their Kenya Kariru AB, so let’s check out the details…

The “AB” in the name of this coffee is the size of beans. Kenyan coffee was traditionally sorted by bean size, and this is a tradition that remains today. Sizes of beans do not equate to differences in the cup, quality, etc, so outside of a nice uniform look to the roasted coffee, it doesn’t mean anything to us end consumers. The biggest size in the Kenyan system is AA, followed by AB. This coffee comes from the Baragwi Farmers Cooperative Society Limited. Most Kenyan coffee is grown by smallholder farmers who pool their resources in co-ops that own washing stations. The farmers combine their harvests and the co-op sorts and processes their coffee into lots. According to their website, this co-op formed in 1953, has almost 17,000 members and owns 12 wet mills, so it’s a whopper! This particular lot of coffee comes from the Kariru washing station in the Kirinyaga area of Kenya and it’s SL-34 and SL-28 varieties grown around 1700-1800masl. This is a washed coffee in the Kenyan style and about 900 growers make use of the Kariru station. Vibrant gives us tasting notes of, “Strawberry, herbs, butterscotch,” none of which fall into what I would call your “standard” flavor descriptors for Kenya. I like that!

I’m using my standard pourover method of a 1:16 ratio of 22g of coffee to 352g of Third Wave Water in a Trinity Origin dripper with Kalita 155 filter. My grinder is a Knock Aergrind.

The aroma on this coffee is pleasant, but hard to place. It’s herbaceous, almost minty, even, but I don’t know if that “minty feel” I’m getting in my nose is from the coffee or the fact that the air is cold here this morning after a night that dipped into the 40’s. Taking a sip I’m greeted by a heavy-bodied coffee with a syrupy mouthfeel that clings to my tongue and throat as I drink. I’m getting a big savory component to this coffee, and there is also some pleasant citric acidity in the front end of the sip. Combine these two components and, for me, this is the always-weird-sounding descriptor you almost only ever see used with Kenyan coffees: tomato. This coffee is really tomatoey for me and I really like that. I’m getting a savory, just short of saline quality to this cup that is backed right up with a lemony acidity. The acid profile has some hints of pink grapefruit and grapefruit peel pith, too, which is always expected and welcome in Kenyan coffees, too. That big savory component, citrus and the heavy mouthfeel combine in a way that reads to my brain as tomato soup! For people who don’t know this flavor/mouthfeel, I know how weird it sounds, and this coffee doesn’t really taste like tomato soup, per se, but the combo of flavors and mouthfeel are unmistakeable as such, all the same. There is an earthy quality to this coffee in the midsip and in the second half of the sip, I get some strawberry flavor but also a lot of strawberry mouthfeel… For me, it’s that slight puckering/tightening effect in my taste buds that I’ll get from a not-quite-totally-ripe strawberry. I guess this is technically “astringency” but astringency is a flaw in coffee and I wouldn’t call this flawed in any way. The strawberry notes are light and fresh and the mouthfeel of the dry finish adds to that “tightening” feel on my palate. The finish and aftertaste are strawberry and grapefruit, for me, and the aftertaste lingers for as long as I can wait between sips.

Reading back over my description, what I have to say about this Kariru AB sounds, frankly, weird. But, it’s a really good cup! Kenyan coffees can have some really unique properties either because of the SL-28 and SL-34 beans themselves, or probably also because of the type of processing Kenyan coffees go through, which often involves dry and wet fermentation and some other unique practices. This is a really nice coffee with a lot of complexity and I am enjoying drinking it very much, despite how strange my description sounds! Taking big sips and turning my brain off I’m getting lots of pink grapefruit, some strawberry, and a hint of something that feels a little minty on my palate, so there are plenty of more standard flavors to be found in this cup for less geeky drinkers, too!