Region · in Kenya
Nandi Hills
Nandi Hills is Kenya's second estate belt, on the escarpment north of Kericho where the highlands break away towards the Lake Victoria basin. It is estate country in the same sense Kericho is, large plantations with their own factories, but under different ownership and on a narrower shelf of land. What sets it apart is what it borders: the Nandi forests, surviving fragments of the rainforest that once ran west into the Congo basin, with tea planted right up against their edge.
What grows here
Black CTC, the same product Kericho makes and sold into the same blends. Orthodox and specialty lots are made in small quantity on some estates. There is no distinct Nandi style, and a seller offering one should be asked what they mean by it.
The ground
Around 2,000 m, broadly the same altitude band as Kericho, with the same equatorial pattern of no frost, no dormancy and continuous plucking. The difference is position. Nandi sits on the western lip of the highlands, dropping away towards Lake Victoria, so the gardens occupy a narrower and steeper shelf than Kericho's plateau and are laid out around surviving forest blocks rather than across open ground. Those fragments are why the district turns up in conservation literature about as often as in tea literature.
What to look for
Ownership is the practical difference from Kericho. The largest Nandi estates belong to Eastern Produce Kenya, part of the Camellia group, which also runs several neighbouring estates and their factories, where Kericho's biggest belong to the successors of Unilever and Finlays. The leaf from both districts is blended alongside the other regardless. Smallholder factories operate in the same county, so the estate-versus-smallholder question applies here exactly as it does next door. Treat a Nandi Hills label as a district address rather than as a claim about the cup.
How it got here
The Nandi plateau was opened to settler farming after a decade of armed resistance ended in 1905 with the killing of the Nandi leader Koitalel arap Samoei, and tea followed onto that land in the decades after. The estates it produced have changed hands repeatedly since independence without changing shape.
Other places in Kenya
- Kericho
- Kiambu
- Kisii
- Mount Kenya
- Murang'a
- Nyeri
- Rift Valley