MULADONA'S SEVENTH TALE, Colombia

Suitable for all brewing methods.

Roasters Notes: Blueberry, Honeycomb, Hibiscus

Finca Tres Edgaritos sits in the hills above Timbio, a municipality in the department of Cauca in Colombia's southwest. The farm is worked by Edgar Moreno, one of a line of Cauca smallholders who have earned a name across the region for careful, deliberate coffee. Cauca is mountainous country, and its coffee grows on small plots strung high across the slopes of the Andes, most of them between 1,700 - 2,200 MASL. The department is widely counted among the finest coffee origins in Colombia, and the reputation is earned lot by lot, on ground like this.

The land here carries the mark of the cordillera. Cauca's soils are volcanic and deep, rich in the minerals that feed a slow, even crop, and the high elevation holds temperatures down through the growing season. Cold nights and warm days stretch the ripening of the cherry, so sugars and acids gather in the seed over a longer window than they would lower down. The brightness and structure the region is known for are drawn out by little more than height and climate.

This is a traditional washed coffee. Cherry is picked by hand at full ripeness, depulped, fermented, and washed clean before it is dried slowly on the farm. The approach is unhurried and exacting, the artisanal method that has carried Cauca coffees onto competition tables and into the hands of roasters abroad. Washing strips the fruit back to the bean and lets the character of the variety and the site come through without the weight a natural process would add.

The variety is Shakiso, an Ethiopian selection carried far from its origin and planted in Colombian soil. The name belongs to a high district of the Guji zone in southern Ethiopia, part of the belt where coffee first grew wild and where heirloom landrace genetics still run distinct from the rest of the country. Those same genetics, set at altitude in Cauca and finished as a washed coffee, are what lift this cup into its floral, fruited register.