Farm: Maguta Estate
Producer: David Ngibuini & Project Origin
Region: Nyeri & Embu
Variety: SL28 & SL34
Process: Carbonic Maceration Natural Amber - Lot 8724
Altitude: 1650 - 1800 masl
Harvested: 2024
CUPPING NOTES: Red grape, yellow plum, passionfruit, peach, nectarine, marmalade, brown sugar, orange, lemon candy, sweet.
Transparency.
What we paid:
-Coffee: 35€/Kg
-Shipping: 2€/Kg
-Packaging: 1.50€/bag
Quantity bought: 30 Kg
Project Origin
Project Origin is a green coffee sourcing company founded by Sasa Sestic, the 2015 World Barista Champion. Known as "The Coffee Man," Sasa has been a transformative figure in the coffee industry, driven by a passion for quality, sustainability, and creating meaningful connections between producers and consumers.
Through Project Origin, Sasa focuses on direct trade relationships, ensuring producers are paid well above market prices. The company works closely with farmers in over 18 countries, helping improve farming practices, experiment with coffee processing, and achieve sustainability goals. Their Project Origin Community Fund supports initiatives like better infrastructure, education, and healthcare in coffee-producing communities.
For Sasa, coffee is about more than just exceptional flavor—it’s about making a positive impact on the people and environments that create it. Project Origin embodies this ethos, bridging the gap between passionate producers and appreciative coffee lovers worldwide.
We’re thrilled to bring you something truly special: a collaboration between Project Origin and David Ngibuini from Maguta Estate in Kenya.
Maguta Estate.
The Maguta Coffee Estate, run by David Ngibuini, works across Nyeri and Embu counties in Central Kenya, and produces some of the most classically extraordinary Kenyan coffee you can access. The Murware Farmers who deliver their cherries to this Estate possess a team spirit and assist each other to maintain their farming standards. This group is a fast-growing cluster of farmers in the Muruguru area with a collective 18,000 trees growing coffee cherries on red volcanic soils.
The Maguta Estate contains enough materials to process coffee to a high-quality that allows the producers and farmers to be paid a better income. It has 10 fermentation tanks, 3 shaded parabolic drying tables each with a 1-tonne capacity, an all concrete fermentation room, Brix meter, pH meter, and more to help improve the processing quality.
In addition, Project Origin have collaborated with Maguta Estate to build carbonic maceration infrastructure that can be used to process coffee from all the farmers in the region, as a way of building a sustainable resource for producing high-quality grade coffees.
Recently, the Kenyan coffee sector has slowly declined in production due to farmers moving away from coffee production to alternative cash crops, a decision driven by the poor payments to the farmers for their work. By working with Maguta Estate, Project Origin hopes to help them reach their goals of empowering the communities and improving their livelihoods by building the resources they need to increase their coffee quality, and therefore, increase the prices of the cherries they work to produce.
Processing
- Picking of only red cherries
- Cherries are placed inside sealed tanks and filled with CO2 pushing oxygen out
- Controlled yeast activity, temperature and humidity of tanks
- Extended anaerobic fermentation time in whole cherries at cool temperatures
- Cherries are removed from the tank and laid in thick stacks for slow drying
- Cherries are dried slowly over 25-35 days until moisture content is reduced to 10-12%
- Coffee is then delivered to the dry mill until export
