Evan HoweDelicious Kenyan Coffees from the “Retro 1984” Project

There have been relatively few Kenyan coffees on Passenger’s menu in recent years, and as those who've followed our sourcing efforts since the beginning will know, this was not always the case. While our team has always had a deep appreciation for the mouthwatering acidity and jammy, dark fruit sweetness that the finest Kenyan profiles offer, we have found it increasingly difficult over the past five years to identify and purchase Kenyan coffees that possess the cup qualities we look for.

This doesn’t mean that great Kenyan coffees weren’t being produced in recent years, or that quality potential has dramatically declined in Kenya. We simply found that a significantly lower percentage of the Kenyan offer samples that we had the opportunity to taste met our quality targets. And due to the fact that Passenger’s sourcing model, and coffee menu, has increasingly concentrated investment on the seven Foundational Partnerships, we have increasingly chosen not to buy outside those partnerships unless cup quality is extraordinary.

Earlier this year, our friends at SEY introduced us to an exciting project that they were developing in collaboration with Peter Mbature of Kamavindi Coffee Lab, and Tim Hill of Atlantic Specialty Coffee. Titled “Retro 1984”, the project was launched to better understand the obstacles to more consistent coffee quality in Kenya and to work closely with an ambitious group of small estate farmers and community cooperatives to properly incentivize, produce, and bring to market highly traceable microlot outturns exhibiting the beloved Kenyan flavor profiles that less optimistic voices in the specialty coffee industry had claimed were gone for good.

The name “Retro 1984” indicates a core aim of the project: to revive and celebrate older methods, ideas, traditional SL varieties, and time-honored processing approaches that reflect Kenyan coffee production in the early 1980’s, prior to the introduction of the hybrid Ruiru 11 variety in 1985. In the words of the project’s authors:

“the goal of the Retro 1984 coffee project is to see if buyers and farmers can collaborate to recreate the flavors that Kenyan coffee farmers became famous for.”

An inspiring idea to be sure, but would the coffees deliver on the cupping table? Earlier this year I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to taste through a table of early offers from farmers and cooperatives who were participating in the Retro 1984 project. In recent years I would have been excited to cup through a similar table and find one or two samples showing good quality. Imagine my surprise when the entire table of 15+ offer samples was consistently excellent! Acknowledging that these coffees represent only the first year of the project and that refinements are already being planned for the upcoming 2025/2026 harvest, it is hard to overstate how exciting it is to taste this cup quality, and see this level of variety, outturn, and single farm separation and traceability at such an early stage. The four Kenyan microlots that are joining Passenger’s Reserve Lot menu this summer - Kamavindi, Gatura, Kambarare, and Thunguri - offer a vibrant tour of some of the early highlights of the Retro 1984 project.

For those of you who, like me, have missed seeing an array of outstanding Kenyan microlots on Passenger’s menu, I hope you enjoy these coffees while supplies last! We are grateful to the founders of Retro 1984 for extending the opportunity to purchase a portion of these inaugural lots, and we are excited to broaden our investment in this unique project in the years to come.