Colombia - El Rancho Pink Bourbon

TASTING NOTES

Passion fruit, Yoghurt, Pink peppercorn.

WHY WE LIKE IT

A tropical, floral coffee with a spicy spark that sets it apart. Passion fruit comes through from the very first sip, juicy and bright, over a very clean floral backdrop. As it cools, it takes on an almost milky creaminess that reminds us of fruit yoghurt, with blackberry and an elegant pink peppercorn finish. An expressive, distinctive coffee for those who love fruity cups with personality.

HISTORY

Huila, in southwestern Colombia, has a deeply rooted coffee tradition. Coffee is grown in 35 of its 37 municipalities, and nearly three in four rural families make their living from it. With more than 146,000 hectares under cultivation, it is the country's leading coffee-producing region, and within it San Agustín is one of those mountain corners where specialty coffee has found its home.
There, in the village of Alto del Obispo, lies El Rancho farm: twenty hectares, eighteen of them planted with coffee, with a harvest that runs from April to December and cherries picked entirely by hand. El Rancho belongs to the Cadefihuila Cooperative and has been owned since 2013 by an association of coffee growers, who conceived it as a collective workspace devoted to developing specialty coffees and experimenting with different processes. The farm also takes in coffee from other producers in the area, making the most of its wet mill's capacity and strengthening that shared commitment to quality.
Behind it all is Cadefihuila, an association that brings together 3,500 coffee growers across 28 municipalities in Huila, most of them smallholders with farms of just two or three hectares. This family-run model allows every stage (picking, processing and drying) to be handled with a level of care that is hard to achieve at a larger scale.

VARIETAL AND PROCESS

Pink Bourbon is a variety closely tied to Huila, where it has been spreading among producers who work with specialty coffee. What sets it apart is the colour of its fruit: the cherry ripens not to red or yellow, but to a salmon pink that signals when it is ready to be picked. It is a demanding, low-yielding variety, which is why it is almost always found in small lots. At El Rancho it has been grown for around seven years, alongside Caturra, at 1,750 metres above sea level.

This lot is washed: after the cherries are hand-picked, the pulp is removed, and the beans are fermented and washed before drying. It is the most classic processing method and tends to produce the cleanest, most defined cups, because it removes much of the fruit's sugary mucilage before drying and lets the character of the variety and the terroir shine through.

RECIPE

For filter:
We use 18 g of ground coffee and 306 g of water at 90 ºC. We begin with a 56 g bloom, wait 45", and complete with successive pours up to 306 g for a total time of 2'30"