Colombia - El Jaragual Rosado [25/26]

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter

Lightest Influence: Our first time roasting this coffee on our own Loring, our first roasts have come out a touch closer to "Light" than we'd like, but we're slowly working it back towards Lightest - where acidity and the aromatics sit at their absolute peak. This coffee has so much inherent sweetness that our goal is simply to just let it shine, without adding flavours of roast

Best Rested: 3-4 weeks

Filter: 60-62g/L, 96°C when fresh but when well rested you can go down to 93-94°C

Espresso: 18g/48g/23s-26 - turbo-esq shots. 

We’re tasting: Really consistent year to year - very fruity aromatics, like strawberry syrup. In the cup it's passionfruit & mango icecream (like solero), ripe raspberry picked right from the cane, peach rings, icing sugar sweetness, with the intense thiol profile of galaxy hops as it cools. Intensely sweet

Traceability

The Story

We split the entirety of this crop's Rosado with another roaster, so until the next container lands - we'll be your UK suppliers for this harvest. It's been an absolute pleasure working with Jonny and Jorge and with each year as the trees mature, the quality of this lot has been steadily increasing. 

We somewhat take it for granted that people already know this coffee because it's gained an incredibly rapid reputation, but if you don't know already - the samples from the first harvest were so good, we took the risk to air-freight several boxes to use as our showcase coffee at the first London Coffee Festival we exhibited at as Scenery. By doing so we were the first roasters in the world to release coffee from El Jaragual, cementing a relationship that's been going from strength to strength ever since. This coffee put us on the map, and it's genuinely exciting each time we get to bring it back and share it with the world again.

Finca El Jaragual

Finca El Jaragual sits at 1500 MASL in the Amalfi municipality of Antioquia, Colombia. This region is nestled in the northern section of the central spine of the Colombian Andes mountain range and is ideal for growing high quality coffee. The farm is named after Jaragua grass - an African wild-grass that has become naturalised to Colombia, frequently grown for feedstock and fodder, drought resistant and hardy.

Originally a 150-hectare plot, the farm was briefly split as Jonny’s cousins acquired 90 HA about a decade ago.  The remaining 60 HA were purchased by Jonny and his brother about 5 years back, in 2019 - with the work between now and then converting part of the farm back to coffee production and waiting eagerly for the first harvest. 

The majority of El Jaragual is planted with forestry, thanks to Jonny’s cousin's experience as a forestry engineer. A mixture of pine forest plantations being grown for sustainable timber, alongside protected plots of native forest.

Jonny and Jorge are growing 7 varieties at El Jaragual, under plantain shade trees - from the more classic Castillo/Colombia to Rosado & Typica Mejorado. They are planting new cultivars at the moment, such as Ombligon, Sidra, and Laurina.

The processing at El Jaragual has been done with a deft touch - extended ferments, with yeast inoculation, and some thermal control (hot water washes, cold water crashes) to modulate the fermentation rate and green porosity, but without any trace of funk or boozy character.

Overall, an increased amount of technical intervention in the processing, but not on the level of bioreactors and lab plants - a really nice bridge between the classic style of processing and the new, something we can really get full throttle behind in supporting. 

We're convinced El Jaragual is going to be a world renowned farm - having been one of the first roasters to showcase their work, we've been stoked to see some serious heavy hitters bring this coffee on.