Despite its proximity to Ethiopia (widely believed to be the region from which coffee originated), coffee was not cultivated in Kenya until 1893, when French Holy Ghost Fathers introduced coffee trees from Reunion Island. The mission farms near Nairobi, the capital city of Kenya, were used as the nucleus around which Kenyan coffee growing developed. In the short period since, it’s coffee has become some of the most sought after in it’s trade. The Muiri estate was previously known as Kihoto farm (1969-1975) which was later changed in 1976 to Muiri coffee estate after an African tree species called pruners (Muiri in kikuyu language). This is a farm developed with coffee plantations, a wet mill, borehole, large dam, stores and labour cottages. The Muiri Coffee Estate consists of about 156,000 coffee trees that are hand picked August through September. Since 2008 the owners of the Muiri Estate have been fertilizing with organic material–a rareity of its own in Kenya. Timely and selective hand picking is carried out in the fields after which the cherry is delivered to the wet mill the same day it is picked. The red ripe cherries are separated from under ripe and over ripe cherries. The cherries are then sun dried before delivery of the coffee to the dry mill for secondary processing.