Pink Bourbon Coffee
Price range: $32.00 through $300.00
We taste Botanicals, Lemon Curd, Green Apple, & Pale Ale. This fan favorite is unique, complex, and perfect with tonic water.
Colombia Pink Bourbon Coffee. Lactic Process Coffee. Lactic Washed Coffee. Latic Fermentation Coffee.
What’s Pink about this Pink Bourbon Coffee?
A coffee bean starts out as a seed inside a colorful cherry on a tree. Bourbon Rosado, the pink bourbon variety, is named for the rosy pink, “rosado”, color of the cherries the tree produces.
The French were the first to plant heirloom typicas stolen from Ethiopia and Yemen on an island off the coast of Madagascar known at the time as the Bourbon Islands. These coffee plants that self pollinate most of the time came together and created the interspecific hybrid we call Bourbon.
Colombia pink bourbon coffee came about when farmers began to notice a mutation hundreds of years later in coffee that had been transplanted in Colombia.
Instead of red, orange, or yellow bourbon cherries on these trees, they were a rosy color! This was a hybrid of yellow and red bourbon. Most importantly, farmers took time to separate and individually cultivate plants that made this unique fruit. We are so glad they did!
When you think of things that are both pink and delicious, plenty of options come to mind. Pink champagne and lemonade. Starburst and cotton candy. Pink lady apples and grapefruits. Even pink peppercorns and maybe pink salt in your taffy. And now, you can add pink coffee to the list!
How does it taste?
This vibrant bean possesses a bright, smooth pink grapefruit acidity and a floral sweetness. It’s an absolute botanical bomb. We taste green apple, lemon curd, bergamot, and lemongrass.
Pour overs made a broadly but well-structured cup of coffee that changed drastically when a little “bypass” water was added. We taste more delicate flavors like green melon, green tea, and lime blossom when we use a coffee to water ratio that is more water than our usual recipe (1:16 or even 1:17).
Consequently, it always has something fascinating to offer no matter how you brew it, but it is definitely a hoppy cup. If you love a pale ale or an I.P.A. this is the coffee for you.
However, if your coffee order tends to include a request for a bold, sturdy brew, brighter pour-overs or a balanced and complex single-origin Colombia coffee—then, you may just fall in love with this impeccably processed coffee. In conclusion, there are many reasons it is a huge favorite on our site and we are always excited to have it in season.
Discover El Alquimista
Edwin Noreña’s obsession with processing and how our pairs with terroir and varietal have earned him the nickname, El Alquimista (the alchemist). He is an agro-industrial engineer by trade with graduate-level studies in biotechnology. The co-fermentations we offer from his farm Campo Hermoso are magical and are created with only real flowers, herbs and fruits.
Finca Campo Hermoso is a 15-hectare farm outside of Circasia, only a few kilometers north of Quindío’s capital city Armenia. Edwin is a well-connected and highly aspirational coffee producer who focuses on cultivating very specific varieties paired with very specific processing methods designed to express the most surprising, memorable, and delicious coffees possible within his resources.
Finca Campo Hermoso concentrates on growing a wide variety of coffee cultivars, including Pink & Yellow Bourbon, Yellow Caturra, Bourbon Sidra, Gesha, and Cenicafé 1, a resistant hybrid developed by Cenicafé, Colombia’s national coffee research institute. The resulting coffees are often marketed under “El Alquimista”, Edwin’s personal brand for his microlots, which have featured in barista competitions and choosy roasters around the world.
Processing this Pink Bourbon Coffee
Molecular examinations of this varietal have found it to contain higher volumes of glucose than most coffees. This is believed to impart a sweeter cup, a silky body, and a rich mouthfeel. It also makes it a prime candidate for this highly technical processing method.
- Firstly, the ripest cherries are selected, hand-picked, and sorted for quality.
- Secondly, the whole cherry goes through an anaerobic maceration in large tanks.
- Thirdly, the cherries go through another fermentation with concentrated juices from previous fermentations and dry cascade hops.
- Fourthly, drying is carried out using a mechanical drying method the same way a traditional honey process would be performed. This precise and consistent approach ensures the beans achieve the optimal moisture level.
About this Terroir
For such a naturally gifted department as Quindío, it tends to receive less recognition than others for its coffee. Quindío is Colombia’s second-smallest department by size, making up only about 0.2% of the national territory. It’s location, however, right on the central cordillera of Colombia’s vast Andes divide, and centrally between the country’s largest and most influential cities (Bogotá, Medellín, and Cali), give it a high volume of tourist traffic, coffee industry, airline commuters, and idyllic getaways in the form of brightly painted mountain towns, natural reserves, and high elevation tropical landscapes throughout. Almost the entire department is mountainous, its lowest elevations still over 1000 meters, and many parts are dense with coffee plantations, from the small to the large and ambitious.
In addition, check out our Colombia Geisha coffee from Edwin Noreña. More exciting coffees from Colombia!
