Colourful

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Suitable for Filter and Espresso

Best Rested for: 2-3 weeks

Light Roaster Influence:
We roast this blend on the lighter side, with the view that it should still work as an all-rounder for both filter and espresso. Try a modern open recipe at 18g in, 45-50g out in 25-30s when brewing as espresso to really open up the flavour, or 60g/L when brewing on filter.

In combining the excellent agronomy and modern processing in these two lots, we’re tasting: 

Jammy stewed fruit, raisin and lime zest aromatics. In the cup it’s super red-fruit forward with apple, plum, raspberry and cherry as prominent front notes, with root beer & crème caramel on the back. As it cools it develops an interesting fruity spiced note like pink peppercorns, with hints of dried peel and golden raisin

Traceability (Blend Version: 15)

The Story:

Colourful was born out of another concept we wanted to play with, something we felt almost criminally under-explored. There is such huge potential in combining deeply fruity and fun coffees into a blend, yet so often it’s almost seen as sacrilege, that they must be a single origin special release, or else some green coffee buyer secret police will break in and confiscate the sacks back. 

Yet who amongst us has not occasionally chucked the remnants of a special bag or two into the grinder, and found the result to be more than the sum of its parts? So in the full rebellious spirit of  resisting pretentious coffee traditions, we've sought out the most uniquely fruity and fun coffees to feature in Colourful . There's no denying that the funky, wild profile of an anaerobic or experimentally processed coffee might not be for everyone, or the sort of coffee you drink every single day. However, we believe in their ability to surprise and delight, with the objective to showcase the vibrancy and full dynamic range that coffee has to offer. Like a mug full of pick n’ mix sweets, coffee in full colour (not just black and white!).

So here we have it - Colourful. It's a year-round celebration of colour and flavour, giving us the freedom to source, blend, or even to spotlight single origins under its banner. Colourful isn't dictated by its components; instead, its essence is its flavour profile and the fun we have in creating and selecting for it.

Version 15:

Our second exploration of the washed and natural pairing from a single washing station, following the format we first trialled with Colourful V10 (with Ture Waji's Bookkisa). Both Rwandan components come from Dahwe CWS in Gisagara District, Southern Province, recently acquired by Muraho Trading Company, which purchases cherry from over 1400 smallholder farmers across four sectors. The washed and natural make up 70% of the blend, drawing different characteristics from the same intake of cherry - bright and juicy from the washed, jammy & berry forward for the natty. In its first year under Muraho, alongside speciality processing, the station distributed over 85000 coffee seedlings to growers, planted avocado and pineapple, and began building an Ankole cattle herd with fodder and irrigation infrastructure.
Dawhe has been modelled from the ground up as a holistic agricultural development site rather than solely a processing facility, a response to the structural vulnerability of coffee-dependent smallholder households where the average farmer tends around 240 trees with coffee as the only cash crop.Muraho & RM have form here, running composting, agroforestry and interest-free input access programmes across their other stations in Nyamasheke, but Dahwe is now the flagship of this program - part of Raw Material's goal of maximising producer income.

The remaining 30% is a natural processed Starmaya from Finca V&G San Juanillo in Costa Rica's West Valley, run by agronomist Tomas Gutierrez and industrial engineer Allan Vargas. We're out of season on this lot now - as the current (new) crop is finished picking and going through milling, and indeed some early lots are on the water already. But with excellent slow drying, low water activity and being stored in vacuum packs, it's free of age flavours - just a slight bit more in-cherry flavour compared to when we bought it. We had originally planned to release this as a single origin, but since we ran long on CR lots compared to our schedule, we've moved it over to Colourful to keep everything else moving on track.

Starmaya is an F1 hybrid, the first generation cross of two genetically distinct parents - something we've always made sure to include in our yearly offer, as we find the concept exciting. By crossing two very genetically distinct lines (ie, Catimor with Ethopian landrace) F1s express hybrid vigour (yield, rust resistance, cup quality exceeding either parent) - which means they offer one path towards climate and disease resilience, but their seeds segregate, meaning the second generation won't breed true.

In coffee, reproducing F1s has historically required somatic embryogenesis, a lab-based cloning process that is expensive, technically demanding, and restricted to a handful of facilities worldwide. This is a large barrier to entry - countries must have labs capable of the cloning, the seedlings are typically double the cost of traditional varieties grown from seed, and they cannot be propagated onwards by the farmers themselves.

Starmaya pretty neatly sidesteps quite a few of these issues. One of its parents, CIR-SM01, is a naturally male-sterile accession found among wild Ethiopian and Sudanese coffees in Nicaragua in 2001. Because it produces no pollen, it cannot self-fertilise. When planted alongside Marsellesa as a pollen donor in a seed garden arrangement, all seed the sterile parent produces is necessarily F1 hybrids. The result is around half a million seeds per hectare at roughly half the cost of in vitro plantlets. It remains the only F1 coffee hybrid propagable by seed, and it lowers the barrier to accessing high-performing cultivars from laboratory infrastructure to a conventional seed network.