Colourful

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter and Espresso

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.

Best Rested: 2-3+ Weeks

Filter: 60g/L, 93°C

Espresso: 18g/45-50g/20-25s

We're tasting: Big funky aromatics - dried papaya, ripe mango and fruity liqueur; in the cup it's super sweet and syrupy, with very ripe melon, dried strawberry and passionfruit as the front notes, with lime curd behind. As it cools becoming like cherry cola and lime

Traceability (Blend Version: 17)

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 17:

Strawberries and Cream. 
Peanut butter and Jam. 
Fish & Chips. 
Gin and Tonic. 
A cold pint on a hot day

Sometimes you just can't beat a classic combination - it earned its place in the collective gestalt understanding of flavour pairings for a very good reason, and any reductive attempt to "twist" the formula can only ever reduce what made it excellent in the first place. 

As far as fruity coffee blends go, a 50/50 Colombian natty with a washed Kenyan (or really any bright washed East African coffee) is about as close as we'll ever get to the coffee version of a PB&J. It's a classic for a reason - is it the most modern twist on blending?  no - but does it matter when it's this tasty? we think also no.

We first featured a coffee from La Piragua last season with an excellent Rosado lot, and the team picked this fresh crop Striped Bourbon (mutation of Bourbon that has variegated cherries) anoxic natural for Colourful with heavy fermented tropical notes - but perhaps lacking top end clarity. We've paired this with a super crisp AB lot from the Mutungati factory in Kenya, notable for coming from a region less known for coffee production, which stood out to us on the table at a pre-shipment cupping we hosted with Sucafina. We found this coffee to have an electric acidity but missing low end body, and perhaps a little angular in the acidity - so when we combine the two together, they perfectly balance out each others EQs and the blend is more than the sum of its parts.

Each batch roasted separately and post-roast blended.