Tag: Kenya Coffee Factory

The roads to coffee production at Long Miles Coffee

Every coffee that is picked and processed needs a home, which is why coffee production takes different roads within our company.

Raised drying beds at Bukeye Washing Station in Burundi

The first road, modeled in Burundi, includes washing station ownership. In Burundi, we work with 5,500 smallholding farmers- who each grow less than a bag of coffee per annum- to produce and bring to market the coffee they grow. To accomplish this, we own three washing stations and work with farmers on eleven unique hills. Another crucial part of this model is farming. We own coffee farms that stand alongside our smallholding farmers. These farms act as model farms for the surrounding communities as well as give us a chance to experiment with and control some of the variables in growing coffee.

Haron Wachira and Ben Carlson hand-sorting coffee at Thunguri Washing Station in Kenya

The second road coffee production takes within our company is partnership. In Kenya for example, we are partnering with Haron Wachira to rehabilitate and refurbish the Wachira family’s dormant coffee factory and farm located on Mount Kenya, in Kirinyaga County. In our first season, we worked directly with thirty coffee farming families who live in the community. While the Wachira Group is not solely focused on coffee, we share the same vision of working with small-scale coffee farmers to improve their production, access to markets, and the price paid for their coffee.

Raised drying beds at Heza Washing Station in Burundi

We can’t control how much coffee is produced in a season, which is why the third road that coffee production takes at Long Miles is sourcing from partnering coffee producers. Our intention is always to produce our own coffee, but some years we will also share coffees from local partnering coffee producers that have stood out to us on the cupping table. Partnering with these coffees enables us to continue year-round projects and programs that have become essential to who we are, whether that is our team of Long Miles Coffee Scouts, our Trees For Kibira reforestation project, or running Farmer Field Schools– to name a few.

No matter which of these roads we take, our end goal is the same: producing excellent coffees, uplifting the smallholding farmers who grow them, and meeting you, our roasting partners, where you’re at. You might already know this or be familiar with these names, but these are the coffees that our company produces:

Long Miles Micro-lots

To us, micro-lots are coffees that have been carefully curated based on two primary factors: traceable down to a distinct geographical locale where the coffee was grown, and a cup score of 86+ designated by our team. Each delivery of coffee cherry that we receive from our partner farmers at one of our washing stations is sorted and processed differently, depending on the country of origin.

Kibira Micro-lots

Kibira micro-lots are coffees that have been processed by coffee producers surrounding our Long Miles Washing Stations. Our cupping lab and quality control team cups through many dozens of lots in order to find the best coffees to partner with. We source these 86+ scoring coffees knowing that at every step of the way they have been processed according to the Long Miles Coffee standard. Partnering with these coffees enables us to continue programs that have become essential to who we are, namely the Long Miles Coffee Scouts and Trees For Kibira.

Kibira

Kibira lots represent coffees that have been sourced from partnering coffee producers. These coffees, ranging in quality and price, are tailored to your needs based on pre-harvest conversations and are typically contracted in larger quantities.

Hills

Our priority is to produce coffee that is of micro-lot quality, yet some of the coffees that we process fall slightly below the 86 mark designated by our team. Coffees that score between 84-85 points, are blended together and are traceable by washing station and called “Hills.”

If you have any questions about our coffee, please get in touch!

May 25, 2021
A guide to Long Miles Coffee in Kenya

October 24, 2020 is a day that will go down in the history books of Long Miles Coffee. The date marks our official launch of Long Miles Kenya, and our first day of coffee harvest in Kirinyaga County. Not long after that, our first fully washed micro-lots of the season hit the drying tables.

Thunguri Washing Station in Kirinyaga County, Kenya

How did Long Miles Kenya start?

In partnership with Haron Wachira from Akili Holdings Ltd., we have refurbished Thunguri Coffee Factory in Kirinyaga County, Mount Kenya (just east of Nyeri County). In the past, the coffee factory existed to serve the Wachira family and a few of their neighbors who grow coffee in the region. While the Akili Group is not solely focused on coffee, we share the same vision of working with small-scale farmers to improve their coffee production, access to markets, and the price paid for the coffee they produce. Long Miles Kenya will be a long-term partnership with the Wachira family, and the communities of coffee growers in the Mount Kenya region.

During a year [2020] in which travel was seemingly impossible, our founders, head of quality control, managing director, and story team were able to visit and connect with a community of coffee growers in Kirinyaga County who are committed to producing high quality Kenyan coffee. Check out the highlights from our team’s visit here. We’ve sown the seeds for our Coffee Scout program, and will soon start building a team of young agronomists whose mission will be to work alongside our partner coffee growers, empowering them with best farming practices and any support that they might need to produce quality coffee.

How did the harvest season go?

In our inaugural coffee season, (a low harvest year for coffee growers around the country), we collected and processed a small volume of cherry from twenty partner coffee farmers living around Thunguri Coffee Factory, modelling how we produce micro-lots in Burundi. While our inaugural harvest season in Kenya may seem low, building trust within a new community takes time. We’re still listening to, learning from, and getting to know the communities of coffee farming families in the region.

Our team also visited and worked on quality control measures with other farmer-owned coffee washing stations as well as private estates in the region, and cupped through the coffees that they produced this season. Our intention is always to produce our own coffee, but in these early days of establishing Long Miles Kenya we will also be sharing the coffees produced by other coffee washing stations that we enjoyed tasting on the cupping table.

Haron Wachira of Akili Holdings Ltd., and Ben Carlson, co-founder of Long Miles Coffee, at Thunguri Washing Station

We’ve also been thinking about the possibility of starting a Long Miles Coffee Farm in Western Kenya for a while. After looking for over a year, we’ve found a piece of land at 2200masl, close to the edges of a national forest park in Western Kenya. Follow the updates that Ben shared during his recent trip to Kenya here. We’ll soon be planting our first SL-28 coffee trees on this piece of land, pursuing regenerative farming practices. We’ll also continue the works of our reforestation project, Trees For Kibira, in this region, planting out green belts of trees, and encouraging the practice of shade-grown coffee.

Where can I find Long Miles Kenya coffee?

We’ll keep you updated on where you’ll soon be able to find a bag of roasted Long Miles Kenya coffee. In the meantime, we’re receiving pre-shipment sample materials of our Kenyan coffees over the next couple of weeks. If you’re interested in receiving samples, please let us know!

April 9, 2021
Reflections of Kenya: founder’s thoughts from Kericho.

written by Kristy Carlson, co-founder and Story Director of Long Miles Coffee.

As my children’s feet hit the earth in Kenya this past December, their whole beings shifted into a truer version of themselves. The joke was up. The mirage of who I had seen them be for two years in the US dropped away. First buds of spring in human form, they unfurled to embrace it all in real time. Their bodies collectively took the deepest breath that they had taken in two years. I may have been doing the same- it was good to be back.

People often ask me how our trip to Kenya went. That in itself feels odd. I’m so used to correcting the vernacular of the word trip with the response of, “It wasn’t a trip- we actually live there.” But we don’t live in East Africa anymore. We really don’t. It’s still a strange fact.

Elizabeth from Kericho in Western Kenya.

So why Kenya? Why now…. during a global pandemic? Isn’t producing coffee in Burundi enough? Like many things within our company, it came down to relationship.

Ben met Haron at a coffee conference in early 2017. Haron was a keynote speaker sharing about his work with the organization he had started, Akili Group. His desire to positively impact his Kenyan family and neighbors through agriculture caught Ben’s attention and lead to back-and-forth discussions over the following years.

Haron and Margaret Wachira

Years ago, Haron’s uncle had started Thunguri Coffee Factory, near Mount Kenya. It began as a small coffee factory dedicated to Haron’s family and a few neighboring farmers, but for the last two decades the coffee factory has sat idle as aging equipment and leaders could not maintain its profitability. Haron’s passion to revitalize the coffee factory and find new in-roads to improve not only the coffee but his neighbors’ livelihoods felt like a partnership meant for us.

There are the things we did to make the season go around. Tile fermentation tanks. Check. Replace McKinnon. Check. Build new drying beds. Check. Send Jimmy in for quality control. Check. Bring Joy over to help collect farmer stories. Check. Send Raphael in to build relationships. Check. But the real privilege of partnership was having lunch at Grandma Margaret’s house. Margaret is Haron’s wife and by all accounts, especially by our eleven-year-old Neo’s, she makes the best chapati and mandazi in the land. Lunch at her house is a privilege. Leave your shoes at the door and be prepared to be treated like family and a treasured guest all at once.

The larger vision for Long Miles Kenya is not only to work with Haron and his family, but also to have a farm in Western Kenya. This farm has been a dream for many years and we’ve already met many challenges while trying to bring it to fruition. Anxiety. Sleeplessness. Sometimes they won’t leave us even though we’ve left Africa. One thing we learned while beginning Long Miles in Burundi is that most things in life worth doing are held in paradox. Pain and gratitude cycling in tandem. Hardship and joy weaving together. You can watch some of Ben’s musings in his search for land for the farm in Kenya here on our Instagram feed.

Small steps. This is how change happens. Can change be found in the dramatic upheaval or the unexpected right turn? Absolutely. But, more often than not, it is nuanced and shadowed. Change is the vein pulsing and moving through a larger thing. It is waking up and realizing that your newborn baby boy can legally drive a car. It is pushing the flywheel for what seems like a lifetime before it finally ticks over and dreams become reality. Days. They don’t seem like much, especially in a pandemic where they bleed like a monochromatic watercolor into one. The sun rises, then it sets. Sometimes we crave the sunset. The darkness. The doneness. Days aren’t always the focus of our bigger life “goals” but they are the smallness that keeps us all alive. We need the smallness. Small steps. Small daily choices that build a lifetime. Days are the little “yeses” to the future that we barely whisper out loud. With them we can collectively feel a wind under our sails. Change is coming. Hope is near. Long Miles Kenya… is near.

March 15, 2021
2020: the year in review.
What a year it’s been.

Lately, the thought of sitting down to reflect on the past year has felt like an overwhelming task. What really happened to 2020? It goes without saying that last year was unlike any other. For us, 2020 held challenges that were unique to the season and challenges that aren’t all that ‘unprecedented’ when it comes to producing coffee.

The year started off much like any other. Our team worked alongside our neighboring coffee farming communities, preparing coffee farms for the opening of the coffee season and expectant for a harvest better than the previous one. Everything seemed to be on track until the Burundian national coffee board announced a sudden change in regulations.

In order to qualify for an annual production licence, coffee producers were required to have 75% of their forecasted crop in the bank [to be held in trust to pay farmers]. Coming off the backend of a harvest where 25% of the country’s normal export was produced, having these funds in advance was unreasonable for most producers- ourselves included. If any coffee producers were unable to comply with the new regulations, they would lose their washing station(s) along with the permission to produce coffee ever again.

Scrambling to comply in time while the threat of a derailed harvest hung in the air made for a hard couple of months, but thankfully we were able to find a way. Then came the news of how rapidly the virus was spreading across the globe. Neighboring East African countries quickly plunged into strict lockdowns and the Burundi airport shut down. It was the first time in a long time that we had to ask visitors not to travel to Burundi for coffee harvest.

Image taken by Kristy J. Carlson for Imbibe Magazine.

The pandemic aligned itself almost perfectly with the start of coffee harvest. Our thoughts flew straight to: “How can we build protocols to keep the farming communities that we work with and the team safe while continuing to produce coffee?” In a country with limited access to testing facilities and healthcare, where the government enacted few official controls, and COVID-19 updates were mostly shared through the radio, we assumed both the best and worst for Burundi.

All things considered, there was still a lot of beauty and joy found in harvest. The coffee trees continued to fruit and ripen. With hand-washing stations and social distancing in place, we were able to keep the washing stations open for cherry delivery. We celebrated from both near and far with members of our team as they welcomed babies into the world, got married, and as their families grew. We were able to pay coffee farmers on time for their hard work this season! Coffee was exported from Burundi faster than ever before. We continued with the build of Ninga, our third Long Miles Washing Station. Long Miles Kenya was launched, and we saw our first inaugural coffee harvest season in Kirinyaga County, Mount Kenya take place. The seed has been planted and preparations are now underway for the formal launch of Long Miles Uganda.

The year was certainly marked by hardship, loss and a specific set of words constantly strung together. “Unprecedented.” “Uncertainty.” “New normal.” It was also a year marked by bravery and courage; community and connection. Thank you for standing alongside us; for continuing to support Long Miles Coffee.

What lies ahead for us.

In 2017, Ben was sitting with a group of people at The Pulley Collective and an esteemed presenter proclaimed, “There is no sustainable coffee in the world.” Ben was speaking right after him about the hope we see in Burundi coffee, but he approached the stage with the wind out of his sails thinking, “Is it really possible to create a sustainable coffee company?” Ever since that day our company has been combating the harsh realities of coffee’s future with visions of hope. And in 2020, not only was the future of coffee challenged, but the human race’s future as well. It’s been a tough time to keep hoping, but also an impossible time not to grip onto the ship of hope with everything we’ve got.

Here’s how we plan to keep hope alive in 2021:
1. A coffee farm in Kenya. We hope to start one. And that’s it for now.
2. This year we started a pilot project in Kenya and we have loved the results. We hope to continue this project and expand it in 2021.
3. We hope to build a community washing station and a model coffee farm in Uganda.
4. We hope to fully open our Ninga Washing Station in Burundi. It has taken three years for us to get government approval for this washing station. Farmers who currently spend hours walking to the Bukeye Washing Station will have their livelihoods vastly improved by the presence of the Ninga Washing Station. With a keen focus on coffee quality, we will be using newly designed sealable fermentation silos, one of the newest approaches to coffee fermentation.
5. We have plans for the expansion of Trees For Kibira, our reforestation and environmental impact program, within both Burundi and Kenya.
An additional founder’s hope is that we live out of a place of thriving, and support our team to do the same. We are not speaking about a place of great excess, but we have often lived in a place of survival only, cutting all expenses and depending on unreliable pre-financing methods to pay farmers and scrape by. While this can be an efficient way to produce coffee, the instability and stress of it doesn’t always honour the people on our team who work so hard to grow, produce, export and sell this product that we all love so much. We hold a deep belief that the only way to make coffee truly sustainable is to honour the value chain and everyone in it.

How do you plan to keep hope alive in 2021? We’d love to hear from you.
January 27, 2021
What’s the update on Long Miles Kenya? Founder’s thoughts from the cool slopes of Mount Kenya.

written by Ben Carlson, co-founder of Long Miles Coffee.

When Kristy and I started Long Miles Coffee we never dreamed of doing anything beyond producing coffee outside the small village of Bukeye in the high mountains of Burundi. Ten years after our first days in Burundi we find ourselves with three washing stations in Burundi and fresh into the inaugural season of Long Miles Kenya.

Long Miles Kenya is a four year old idea that really started to become a dream and vision for Long Miles Coffee over the past couple years. As COVID gripped the world, I really didn’t see the possibility of our Kenya launch. What I didn’t account for was our Kenyan partner, Haron Wachira, and his capacity and organizational ability to accelerate our vision into reality.

Down the road I’ll share more about how and why we started Long Miles Kenya as well as how we elected to do so in the epicenter of what is Kenya’s finest growing area on the slope of Mount Kenya in central Kenya. What I want to share here is what we have found as we launched into production.

I really wanted to see just how much SL 28 and 34 were still on the slopes of the mountain. On my last exploratory trips, I’ve found Batian and Ruiru being pushed hard on farmers across Kenya. While those Hybrids are quite good, they don’t have the “wow” factor that many in the speciality coffee world have come to love and desire in Kenyan coffee that we find in the SL varieties.

I had our washing station separate two lots from our Kirinyaga farm and also two lots from the neighbors we are leasing land from to produce our micro-lots. These lots will represent our launch into Kenyan coffee and showcase the difference between the Hybrids ands SLs.

Kristy Carlson, co-founder of Long Miles photographing farmers delivering cherries to the coffee factory.

Kristy and I are visiting our different neighbors and hearing their story of life and coffee. What we’ve heard is person after person frustrated with the price they are getting for their coffee. For all the $3-5 cups of Kenyan coffee they hear about being consumed around the world they continue to struggle to even maintain the price they were receiving ten years ago. On top of this, labour prices have increased for harvesting and maintaining the coffee and inputs have drastically increased in cost. “Why keep producing coffee?” many ask. Us working alongside these neighbors to harvest and produce coffee this season gives them some hope and it doesn’t impact their neighbors, they tell me. “How sustainable is coffee in Kenya when only a handful of us receive a better price and help?” And then I request more SL coffee… and I’m taken into the fields and shown the difference between the hybrids and the SL plots. The Hybrids are heavy with cherry and have no noticeable fungus, bugs or issues. The disappearing SL plots are producing half as much and suffering with fungus, insect damage, and CBD (Coffee Berry Disease). If quality in the cup isn’t rewarded to the farmers, I fully understand why we are going to see the end of any SL coffee from Kenya.

The Carlsons visiting neighbors Joyce and Ephantus on their organic SL34 coffee farm. Masks were vigilantly worn during the visit and only removed for this photo.

And yet…there is hope for the SL. If we didn’t see it, I would have to call it a myth or legend. Farmer Joseph has invited us to see his organic SL farm. He’s not one of our neighbors so we are not producing coffee with him, but his story is too unreal not to take a drive to see him. Joseph is harvesting 100kg of cherry per tree (no, this isn’t a typo) and it’s fully organic! We are taking notes and listing the protocols needed to achieve this, and as we wrap up harvest in year one of Long Miles Kenya you can be sure that we are going to be implementing the same strategy as Joseph did to produce his 100kg SL harvest.

I don’t have the space or time to dive into production and quality compromises we have observed in the surrounding factories. What I can say is that with Seth and Raphael coming in from Burundi, and Jimmy arriving for us from Uganda, we are helping implement quality control procedures that we use in Burundi along with an excellent and dedicated management team in place under Haron. Our first taste from the first day’s harvest just happened and all that I can say is that I hope this initial harvest can all taste this good. If it does, my hopes for some of Kenya’s finest coffee will be coming out of Long Miles Kenya washing station.

December 16, 2020

scroll to top

error: