Taste Note: The dry fragrance has a somewhat fruited sweetness that touches on citrus. Intense cup sweetness, with fruited characteristics like mandarin orange and other citrus notes, dark berry, black currant tea, snappy acidity, and an intoxicating fruit-floral aroma in light roasts. At medium dark roast, red fruits, with a whiff of burned sugars in there too. There’s a lovely raw cane sugar smell that emanates from the steam after pouring hot water, as do jammy fruits that carry berry tones. Sweetness is intense in the brewed coffee, and along with fruited characteristics, the myriad of flavors pushes Fram Farm’s cupping score up into the 90’s! Medium roasts produce mandarin-type citrusy notes, along with dark berry, currant tea, and a note of date sugar. Light roasts have snappy acidity that works to further highlight the citrus elements, though the underlying sweetness helps keep that vibrant side feeling well integrated rather than sharp. Fram Farm’s aroma is potent, producing a fruit-floral aspect that’s intoxicating in the lighter roasts. Deeper roast development casts a darker hue over the fruit flavors, like dried berry and plum, and also brings out a soft bittersweetness in the background. Fram Farm AB is bodied and delicious, and at dark roast level you can easily taste the dark fruit flavors that make this lot a personal favorite!
Kiambu lies near the foothills of Gatamaiyo Forest Reserve, and at the border of neighboring Muranga County. Fram Farm is owned and managed by the Kariruki family, James getting his start in coffee through a small plot he inherited from his grandfather. Now at 40, James has expanded their farm to nearly 30 hectares, the entirety planted in SL-28, and sitting at roughly 1850 meters above sea level.
This is one of a few small estate coffees we were lucky enough to buy this year, coffees we had no direct connection wish in the past. We tend to buy from the Farmers Cooperative Societies (“FCS”), and still do. But buying from a single estate affords us a different and unique opportunity to select coffee that we can trace back to its exact provenance, whereas with the FCS’s, you’re buying a blend of hundreds and sometimes thousands of small holders. This is certainly not a bad thing as some of our finest Kenyas are through FCS’s, just different.
This Fram Farm lot produces a little more chaff than the average wet process coffee. It’s not like a honey or natural coffee (dry process), but you’ll likely notice a higher volume of silver skin shed during roasting and should keep that in mind when judging the physical color of the roasted coffee.
Bean Specs:
- Origin: Kenya
- Region: Kiambu
- Farm: Fram Farm
- Producer: James Kariruki
- Altitude: 1850m
- Cultivar: SL-18
- Processing: Washed
- Sourcing: Sweet Maria’s