Colombia El Alquimista Red Honey Pink Bourbon

"El Alquimista" means "The Alchemist" and this microlot fits the name perfectly. It tastes like it's a potion created in a wizard's tower. It's got gentle lime acidity, a smooth, silky texture and a super clean finish. It's juicy sweet with big notes of grape, raspberry and honey. May or may not give you magical powers.

Arrival Date: January 14th, 2022

Acidity & Brightness: Gently bright and juicy sweet

Balance & Finish: Slightly complex with a clean finish

Body & Texture: Full bodied with a smooth, silky texture

Flavors: Grape, raspberry, honey & lime

Grade: Excelso, Grown at 1600 masl

Processing: Red Honey, anaerobic cherry fermentation, dried on raised beds.

Grower: Edwin Noreña | Finca Campo Hermoso

Region: Circasia Municipality, Quindío Department

Varieties: Pink Bourbon

Roasting: We like this coffee best at a light to light-medium roast (City to city+) or in the middle of 1st crack. We roasted several batches and found that while all of them were delicious, pulling the roast at about 1 minute after first crack really allowed everything to come through in this cup. You can certainly take it into Full City (in between 1st and 2nd crack) if the cup is a bit too intense for you, though we wouldn't recommend taking it into 2nd crack.

Reminder! This coffee is raw, you must roast it before brewing!

Our Review: "For a naturally gifted department such as Quindío, precious few coffees produced here seem to make it out into the world. Not that there is much to begin with compared to Colombia’s other hulking coffee-producing departments. Quindío is Colombia’s second-smallest department by size, making up only about 0.2% of the national territory. Almost the entire department is mountainous, its lowest elevations still over 1000 meters, and is dense with coffee plantations, from the small to the large and ambitious. Finca Campo Hermoso is a 15-hectare farm outside of Circasia, only a few kilometers north of Quindío’s capital city Armenia. It’s owner, Edwin Noreña, is an agroindustrial engineer by trade with graduate-level studies in biotechnology. Edwin is a well-connected and highly aspirational coffee producer who focuses on cultivating carefully curated varieties paired with precise processing methods, designed to express the most surprising, memorable, and delicious coffees possible within his resources. Finca Campo Hermoso concentrates on growing cultivars far apart from the nationally-distributed hybrids of Castillo or Colombia, or the traditional Caturra. Instead the farm has in production pink bourbon, yellow bourbon, bourbon sidra, gesha, and Cenicafe 1, a rarer resistant hybrid developed by Cenicafé, Colombia’s national coffee research institute. The resulting coffees are marketed under “El Alquimista”, Edwin’s personal brand for his microlots, which have featured in barista competitions on the shelves of choosy roasters around the world.

The pink bourbon variety is a mutation of red bourbon, simply known as “bourbon”, a centuries-old heirloom that was once a staple variety for most of Latin America. In the past 15 years, however, mainly due to disease and climate change, bourbon has become a minority variety everywhere in Latin America save for Brazil. As a result, the variety has become harder to find and typically only produced in microlot quantities. With bourbon at such a scarcity, you can imagine the value of a lot like this: not only is it a pure bourbon, but it is a regionally specific lineage of the variety brought to market only recently. The unique pink pigmentation of the fruit, and what many agree is a distinctly delicious personality in the cup, has recently been propagated and marketed within southern Huila, not far from Quindío, but almost nowhere else to date. Edwin’s “red honey” process uses a combination of anaerobic cherry fermentation, mucilage fermentation, and a traditional honey process to achieve the final profile. Cherry is picked and sorted for processing like all cultivars on Campo Hermoso—at peak maturation, manually picked, and floated in water to sort by density. Once picked, the cherry undergoes a 56-hour anaerobic fermentation in a low-oxygen environment, a technique that allows the fruit pulp to break down and sugars to peak, often imparting a tangy snap to the acids of the final cup. After anaerobic fermentation is complete, the coffee is depulped and fermented dry for another 48 hours, and finally set out directly to dry on raised beds in the sun." - Royal Coffee

"El Alquimista" means "The Alchemist" and I can't think of a more appropriate branding for this coffee. This microlot tastes like it was created in a wizard's tower and it may or may not give you magical powers. I'm more apt to call this a potion than a cup of coffee. Our favorite roast (about 1 minute after 1st crack) was absolutely incredible. The predominant flavor notes were grape, super ripe raspberry and, oddly enough, honey, though we did detect a gentle lime acidity along with some milk chocolate and floral tones. The body is nice and full with a silky to creamy texture and a very clean finish. The cleanliness of the cup is actually a standout feature. We were anticipating some earthy tones as you would expect in a semi-washed coffee but they're basically non-existent. This potion is that rare combination of flavorful, exciting and dangerously easy to drink.