Kenya Kaliluni AA Introduction| Machakos, Kenya Kaliluni AA

Kaliluni AA is produced by many small farmers, who are members of the Kaliluni Farmers' Cooperative Association, who send coffee to Kaliluni Coffee Factory, a famous washing plant in Kenya. These farmers live in the mountains about 60 kilometers southwest of Nairobi. Coffee in the area is not as famous as nearby Kiambu and Embu, but its high altitude and rolling hills make the land very suitable for producing high-quality coffee beans. The harvest here is earlier than in some other parts of Kenya.

Kaliluni factory is F.C.S. The only factory. The temperature in the area is between 12 and 25 degrees Celsius throughout the year, and the annual bimodal rainfall is about 680 millimeters (also slightly drier than other areas). It is harvested from June to August. The average size of a smallholder farm is less than 1 hectare, with an average of 250 coffee trees per farmer.

Farm: Kaliluni Cooperative

Varieties: SL 28pi SL 34 and some Ruiru 11

Treatment: sun exposure and washing

Altitude: 1450 to 1600 m above sea level

Owner: 1475 members of FCS

Production area: Kaliluni, Machakos County, Eastern Province

Kaliluni cooperatives are part of the larger organization Machakos Cooperative Union (Machakos co-operation Union), which, together with some 28 other cooperatives, provides services to these communities, including coffee processing and marketing, education and training, and agricultural inputs at subsidized prices. These benefits enable producers to bring high-quality harvests at the right time. The alliance also provides a wide range of services, including transportation, bookkeeping and accounting, as well as access to coffee seedlings.

This batch contains a small amount of Ruiru 11 in addition to SL28 and SL34. Ruiru 11 is named after the space station in Ruiru, Kenya, which was developed in the 1970s and launched in 1986. Although Ruiru accounts for a very small proportion of the total yield of cooperative members, Ruiru is more and more widely distributed in this region because of its resistance to coffee fruit disease and coffee leaf rust. It also crosses with SL28 and SL34 to ensure high quality.