About the roaster: Coffee Collective

Coffee Collective was founded in Copenhagen in 2007 by Klaus Thomsen, Peter Dupont, and Casper Engel Rasmussen, and opened its first coffee bar on Jægersborggade the following year. Thomsen won the World Barista Championship in 2006 and Rasmussen the World Cup Tasters Championship in 2008, but the company’s reputation rests less on competition results than on how it buys green coffee.

They buy directly from farms and publish what they pay for every single lot, a practice they helped define and now hold as a trademark on the term Direct Trade. The prices are consistently far above both the commodity market and Fair Trade minimums. The roastery sits at Godthåbsvej in Frederiksberg behind a glass wall you can watch through, the company is a certified B Corp, and it remains owned by its founders.

Gichathaini and the Gikanda cooperative

Gichathaini is a washing station, or factory in Kenyan terms, in Nyeri County on the eastern side of Mount Kenya. It belongs to the Gikanda Farmers Cooperative Society alongside Kangocho and Kangunu, and roughly 1,850 members deliver cherry to it. Most farm plots of a hectare or less, so a single bag of this coffee is the combined work of a large number of very small growers.

The relationship goes back a long way: Gichathaini was the first Kenyan factory Coffee Collective visited, in the year they founded the company. The factory runs its own nursery where members can collect SL28, SL34, and Batian seedlings, which is how a cooperative maintains variety quality across hundreds of independent smallholdings.

Controlling the coffee to export

Gichathaini now has its own dry mill and cupping lab, which is unusual. In the standard Kenyan system, parchment leaves the wet mill for a third-party dry mill and often passes through the Nairobi auction, and traceability blurs at each handover. Running their own mill lets Gichathaini keep the lot intact from cherry to export container, and shortens the time coffee sits in parchment. That control is a large part of why their coffees show the clarity they do.

What to expect in the cup

This is the Kenyan reference profile: high acidity, firm structure, and clear fruit rather than jammy sweetness. Gooseberry and rhubarb are the tart end of that, and sea buckthorn adds a sharp, almost citrus-bitter edge. The SL28 and SL34 varieties are the main drivers here; both were selected in Kenya in the 1930s and are still the backbone of the country’s specialty output despite yielding poorly. If you find Kenyan coffee too aggressive, brew slightly coarser and cooler, or give the bag a few extra days to rest.

Specifications