It’s no secret that coffee is grown all around the world. Look at any specialty roaster’s offerings, and the diversity of origins available should illustrate this fact. Lesser known is the often circuitous journey coffee took in traveling all around the world. While the Arabica species and many of its main varieties are believed to have originated in Ethiopia and grown for thousands of years, commercial coffee production was only introduced to most African countries in the late 19th or early 20th century. Such is the case with Joe Bean’s newest offering from the Chania Estate in the Thika region of Kenya.
In the late 1800s, coffee was being reintroduced to the African mainland by Dutch, French, and English colonists. In Kenya, coffee was introduced by French missionaries who had been cultivating a particularly productive variety on an island known then as Bourbon (now RĂ©union, 1848). This variety became…