El Mirador / Colombia – Reserve Series

This coffee is a stunning combination of rarity and experimentation. Grown in Palestina, Huila, Colombia, this orange bourbon variety begins showing its unique quality even before it has been harvested from the tree. Rather than expressing its ripeness through a bright red hue as is most common with coffee cherries, this variety turns a vibrant orange color at peak ripeness, demanding extra attention from the picking teams in the field. This diligence often pays off in producing a coffee with a pronounced juicy and sweet acidity that, whether through suggestion or not, is reminiscent of oranges.

The processing that this coffee undergoes also adds another level of distinctiveness. The El Mirador farm is owned by experimental processing veteran Elkin Guzman, who has been pushing the envelope of coffee processing for many years now, creating some of the most exciting coffees available from Colombia. This coffee uses a method called carbonic maceration in the fermentation process. Borrowed from the wine-making community, it involves displacing the oxygen in a sealed fermentation tank with carbon dioxide to create a new environment where a different set of microorganisms will metabolize the sugars creating new flavors, resulting from fermenting in an open-air environment. El Mirador uniquely approaches this method by using two fermentation periods.

Coffee Profile

Coffee Bio

These layered fermentations create a complex coffee with a juicy sweetness, highlighting the gorgeous payoff of a years-long journey of diligent experimentation.