Ritual Coffee Roasters
Sweet Tooth Espresso

The anti-blend made for espresso adventurers, our Sweet Tooth offering changes several times throughout the year. Kenya Tambaya AA Tambaya factory is one of eight factories from the Rumukia Farmers’ Cooperative Society. Although they joined in 2004, has been serving the farming families of Nyeri as a producer owned cooperative for over 30 years. Tambaya’s current membership is now over 843 producers strong. It is here where smallholder producers – with the average producer tending to about 250 trees on farms averaging less than 2 acres – deliver their ripe coffee cherries come harvest time. Nowhere are coffees as thoroughly cleaned as they are in Kenya. The typical process looks something like this: a producer will arrive in the late afternoon after picking with their day’s harvest. First, the cherries are laid out on mats and sorted for ripeness. After a quick quality check, the cherries are collected together with others of similar quality throughout the evening. After the cherries are collected and graded, they move to a depulping machine to remove their fruit. The sticky mucilage covered coffee beans are left in open concrete tanks to ferment. Then, after 24 hours they are washed and left to ferment again, without water, for another 12-24 hours. The parchment is then washed before being soaked in tanks for another period of roughly 12-18 hours. At this stage, the beans are moved to skin drying beds where they are laid out in thin layers to allow the mass of water weight to fall. This happens over the course of a morning. This entire process is sometime referred to as the 72 hour process. From there the coffee goes to raised drying beds for the next 8 to 12 days. By the end of this process, the coffee is as clean as a whistle. The work is already done. Not a drop of mucilage will be found on the pristinely white parchment, and no extra flavor is imparted to the beans except by what happened at the farm and in the fermentation tanks.