This release from Nariño begins the main harvest season from Nariño, San Agustín, and Tolima! Nariño is one of our favorite coffee growing regions and one of the most mysterious and under-represented. In the cup we find lush red fruits, Key lime, and cacao.
Caturra, V. Colombia, Tabi
Buesaco, Nariño
2,000 masl
July, 2022
Hand picked at peak ripeness. Floated to further remove defects. Fermented in cherry for 12 hours, depulped, and dry fermented for an additional 36 hours. Dried on raised beds until moisture content reaches 10-11%.
Variety Colombia (V. Colombia) is the result of the hybridization of Caturra with the Timor Hybrid. Developed over five generations by Cenicafé between 1968 and 1982, V. Colombia is high-yielding, and has excellent resistance to disease. This combination of traits makes V. Colombia a very popular variety in Colombia. It generally has decent cup quality potential, but with improved picking practices and fermentation experiments we are seeing quality improve dramatically.
Tabi was introduced by Cenicafé in 2002. It is a variety produced by crossing Typica, Bourbon and Timor Hybrid. Like most other hybrids, one of the most important attributes of Tabi is its resistance to coffee leaf rust. However, because of its use of Bourbon and Typica genetics, it also displays good to very good cup quality and is one of the best hybrids we've tasted from Colombia.
Caturra is a natural mutation of the Bourbon variety. It was discovered on a plantation in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil sometime between 1915 and 1918. Today, it is one of the most economically important coffees in Central America, to the extent that it is often used as a benchmark against which new cultivars are tested. In Colombia, Caturra was thought to represent nearly half of the country’s production before a government-sponsored program beginning in 2008 incentivized renovation of over three billion coffee trees with the leaf rust resistant Castillo variety (which has Caturra parentage).
The cost of getting a coffee from cherry to beverage varies enormously depending on its place of origin and the location of its consumption. The inclusion of price transparency is a starting point to inform broader conversation around the true costs of production and the sustainability of specialty coffee as a whole.