Colourful

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Suitable for Filter and Espresso

Best Rested for: 2-3 weeks

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 blueberry, bubblegum, floral honey and yellow plum in the blend - but with such complex coffees, there are more interpretations you can bring out through brewing at home.

Traceability:

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 6:

Our midsummer refresh sees new fresh crop lots drop it into Colourful. Both lots a twist on the classics, and dear to our hearts in what they represent - a Colombian smallholder field blend lifted up via anoxic processing, and a classic Costa Rican natural - but with a modern F1 hybrid variety

First up we have the Vereda Bohemia smallholders “Neighbours of El Fénix” project. Finca El Fénix - as we described in the write up for the delicate and silky Wush Wush lot - was originally designed to be a community wet mill. While it has mainly pivoted to education as well as processing experimentation, the mill still fulfills that original purpose - centralised processing with value addition, acting as a place for smallholders to sell cherry for onwards processing. This field blend from a small sub-locale close to El Fénix is made up of principally Castillo with some Colombia and Caturra, has been processed as an anoxic washed lot, adding depth, tropical sweetness and complexity as an additional layer to the sweet milk chocolate, apple and brown sugar these varieties tend to show at the medium altitudes of Vereda Bohemia. We selected this lot at a Raw Material cupping, on a table where it sat alongside - and held its own - with the exotic varieties grown at El Fénix itself.

While the Colombian lot had deep sweetness, acidity and complexity, to complete the colourful profile we always need a coffee that has big, process-dominated character. We’ve selected a fresh-off the boat lot from Finca Los Toños (3rd place Costa Rica COE winner) and the famous Corazón de Jesús micromill. While it’s classically processed as a natural, with all the classic character of a funky, high process influence natural that made it a natural fit for the blend, it’s the variety that drew our eye. We always want the concept of Colourful to be forward looking - thinking not just about coffee as it is now, but coffee as it could yet be.

Coffee - as an agricultural product -  is an “orphan” crop. This is a a nice euphemism for saying there’s a severe imbalance in the amount of funding available for crop research and breeding where a crop is suitable for mass agriculture in the global north, versus that available for research and breeding for a crop typically grown by smallholders in mountainous regions of the global south. 

Coffee is a hard crop to develop - the lifecycle of a coffee tree taking several years to be productive means that breeding programs operate on a timeline of decades, not months or years, and as a result many of the varieties we know and love to this day are the result of local mutations, selections and landrace development as opposed to intentional breeding programs (although NGO/state programs to develop cultivars with increased yields and disease resilience have existed for some time - Colombia, Brazil, Ethiopia and Costa Rica for example).

One of the latest efforts to try and bootstrap new varieties into existence as we face the crisis of climate change (with the knock on effect of a reduction in suitable growing area) is the development of “F1” hybrids. These cultivars cross genetically distinct Arabica varieties - typically one that is very close to Ethiopian wild-type genetics with another from the “Timor hybrid” line (a natural robusta-arabica hybrid that occurred in Timor-leste). These first generation crosses show a property known as “hybrid vigour” - they grow faster, they yield more, they’re resilient to a wider range of weather conditions, resistant to disease, and broadly taste pretty good. 

The catch is that the hybrid vigour effect is only present in the first generation - and the seeds are not stable, meaning F2 generations could show any amount of the mother and father plant genetics (known as “segregation”). Once a suitable candidate F1 hybrid is developed, it effectively needs to be cloned before it’s distributed as seedlings, rather than germinated at a farm level.

The Milenio variety in the blend is an early example of F1 hybrid breeding programs, and was developed in Costa Rica by a consortium of state sponsored and NGO coffee research institutes. It’s a pretty impressive variety - we’ve tried a few in our years and always enjoyed the cups, and it shows promise for the results of the next generation trials that are coming - remembering it takes decades for breeding, and decades further for uptake once the seedlings are available.

There is a reasonable criticism to those who would place the future of coffee purely in the hands of F1 hybrids - we risk making coffee a mono-crop through cloning, and we risk pushing a path of techno-intervention that ignores more holistic methods of land management. The same thought process lead to full-sun growing, which goes hand in hand with excessive agrichemical input.

We’re in favour of holistic solutions that reduce producer risk - integrated land, shade and soil management and education that increase natural resilience and biodiversity, but going hand in hand with better variety breeding and development, as well as ensuring the global north is paying prices that translate to a livable income to coffee producers. To achieve this, there needs to be market demand for these varieties - so with this version of Colourful, we look to a future both bleak in current trajectory, yet positive in the possibilities to change it.