OISEAUX DE PROIE, Kenya

Suitable for all brewing methods.

Roasters Notes: Boysenberry, Cacao Nib, Hibiscus

Nyeri is the hard heart of Kenyan coffee. On the foothills of Mount Kenya the ground runs deep red, heavy with iron and volcanic mineral, and the nights fall cold enough to hold the cherry back and drive its structure inward. In Muruguru, David Ngibuini works Maguta Estate, five acres he took over from his mother and brought back from ruin. It has since become the centre of a growing cluster of smallholders who carry their cherry to his mill by hand, tree by tree, off the same red soil.

The trees are SL28 and SL34, the two selections Scott Agricultural Laboratories drew out of the Kenyan highlands in the 1930s and the backbone of everything this country is known for. Bred for drought and built for the cup, they carry the blackcurrant weight and the razor acidity that mark Kenyan coffee at its most severe. Planted at 1,789 metres on Maguta ground, they are given every advantage the altitude and the soil can grant, and they answer with density.

What sets this lot apart is the Supernatural. Ngibuini has spent years bent over his fermentation, building a natural process that keeps the fruit whole against the bean and draws the sugars in slow and controlled. This is not the clean washed road Kenya built its name on. It is darker and denser, the fruit pushed to its edge while the varietal's structure is held underneath it, and it is the product of one man refining the same method over season after season until it did what he wanted. Nothing about it is accidental.

Red volcanic ground.
An estate raised from ruin.
A process bent to the will of the man who made it.