The harvest from Reina de Saba is one we look forward to every year. It is one of our favorite farms in one of our favorite producing regions. This Caturra separation has excellently structured sweetness and acidity, with notes of papaya and citrus.
Caturra
Santa Monica, San Agustín
1,800 masl
March, 2023
Hand-picked at peak ripeness. Floated to further remove defects. De-pulped on the day of harvest. Dry fermented for 35 hours. Dried on raised beds for 30 days.
Working with the coffees from the famed exporter and producer Alejandro Renjifo of Fairfield Trading continues to be an honor. Alejandro has been an influential contributor to the development of Colombian specialty coffee, and works with some of the best and most well-known producers in all of Colombia. He started his own farming project a few years ago atop San Agustín, in southern Huila, and is currently producing Caturra, Typica, and Gesha.
Caturra is a natural mutation of the Bourbon variety. It was discovered on a plantation in the state of Minas Gerais in Brazil sometime between 1915 and 1918. Today, it is one of the most economically important coffees in Central America, to the extent that it is often used as a benchmark against which new cultivars are tested. In Colombia, Caturra was thought to represent nearly half of the country’s production before a government-sponsored program beginning in 2008 incentivized the renovation of over three billion coffee trees with the leaf rust-resistant Castillo variety (which has Caturra parentage).
The cost of getting a coffee from cherry to beverage varies enormously depending on its place of origin and the location of its consumption. The inclusion of price transparency is a starting point to inform broader conversation around the true costs of production and the sustainability of specialty coffee as a whole.