Description
An explosive Purple Caturra lot featuring vibrant blueberry and tropical pineapple balanced by creamy vanilla and smooth milk chocolate. Makes a spectacular, syrupy single origin espresso.
The sensory experience of this lot is an explosive, multi-layered journey that manages to be both wildly expressive and beautifully clean. The dry grounds offer an intense, sweet fragrance of wild blueberry and fresh raspberry. On the first sip, the palate is hit with a saturated punch of ripe blueberry and tropical pineapple, which gracefully transitions into a heavy, creamy mouthfeel reminiscent of fruit yogurt or vanilla pastry. This intense juiciness is perfectly grounded by a solid foundation of smooth milk chocolate, keeping the complex fruit notes remarkably clean and structured without any boozy or over-fermented harshness. It finishes with a clean, lingering, and bright sweetness. Because of the coffee’s exceptional sugar content and high solubility, it translates beautifully into a single origin espresso, pulling a viscous, syrupy shot packed with vivid fruit sweetness and a dense, velvety crema.
This remarkable profile is achieved through a meticulous, dual-track co-fermentation process that treats the wet mill like a biochemistry lab. Producer Rodrigo Sanchez isolates native microorganisms, such as lactobacillus and saccharomyces cerevisiae yeasts, directly from his own coffee cherries to build a mother culture. For this offering, separate batches of the mother culture are fed with natural sugars like molasses and panela to fuel the fermentation. One batch is infused with concentrated blueberry juice and the other with a vibrant tropical mix of pineapple, passion fruit, orange, and mango. The cultures ferment for 190 hours until their pH and Brix levels exactly match the sugar profile of the freshly harvested coffee. The handpicked cherries are then floated for density, pulped, and sealed into 200-liter tanks with the respective fruit solutions for a precise 150-hour anaerobic fermentation. This highly controlled environment allows the organic compounds of the fruit to absorb directly into the cellular structure of the seed before the coffee is washed and dried slowly on shaded parabolic beds.
The driving force behind this innovation is Finca Monteblanco, located high along the mountain roads of Vereda La Tocora within the San Adolfo municipality of Acevedo, Huila. Perched on a hill crest at 1,730 meters, the farm is managed by third-generation producer Rodrigo Sanchez Valencia alongside his wife Claudia Samboni and farm manager Don Gerardo. Rodrigo’s journey into specialty coffee shifted dramatically in 2002 when he participated in a local program designed to teach the children of coffee farmers how to cup. This opened his eyes to the direct connection between agricultural practices and cup profile. Driven by a desire to create award-winning lots with absolute consistency, Rodrigo thoroughly surveyed his farm and discovered a unique heirloom mutation his grandfather had planted back in the 1980s. This variety, Purple Caturra, gets its name from its deep purple cherries and is prized for its high natural sugar concentration, making it the perfect canvas for Rodrigo's systematic approach to farming.
