Gitare is a wet mill just outside of Nyeri, one of three mills in the larger Kimaratia Cooperative Society. In Kenya, the majority of coffee farmers belong to a cooperative that allows them access to greater resources that would ordinarily be out of reach for any individual producer. While cooperatives can sometimes present quality challenges due to the large number of farmers involved, Kenya has a multitude of cooperatives that operate with very high standards.

670 farmers send their coffee to Gitare; most of these are very small producers, averaging around 200 trees each. For comparison, Kimaratia has 2200 farmers overall, and produces around 465 one hundred and fifty pound bags of green coffee annually. On a per-capita basis, each farmer is growing just over a fifth of a bag.

 We sourced this coffee from the Collaborative Coffee Source of Oslo (CCS), a green coffee supply company that specializes in sourcing exceptional coffees from the world over. We met Bjørnar Hafslund of Kaffa Rostery in Norway and CCS while sourcing in Costa Rica in 2014, and this led to our Barismo becoming one of CCS first US partners after incubating in Scandinavia.