Bourbon Tree Dried Natural • Filter • Peach, Berries, Cocoa

Variety: Bourbon

Process: Tree Dried Natural

Producer: Finca Isabel

Microlot: La Cuesta

Elevation: 1800 masl

Location: Loayza, Caranavi Province, Bolivia

Net weight: 125 or 250 grams whole beans

Roasted for: Filter

Bourbon Pasas comes from the La Cuesta microlot in Loayza and has the particularity of having been dried on the plant itself for 2 weeks. After this time, the cherries were picked and sun-dried to their optimal humidity content. Pasas is Spanish for raisins, and that’s what the cherries look like when dried and harvested from the trees.

Usually specialty coffee cherries are selectively hand-picked at their peak maturation to maximize flavor and sweetness, so why would you want to leave them dry on the trees beyond that perfect moment? First of all, you’ll need a long enough time-window with very sunny and dry weather, as rain or high humidity would inevitably ruin your harvest by fermenting the cherries. Secondly, organizing and deploying your pickers on the different microlots is getting more and more challenging, both finding those workers, as choosing which lot to harvest as with climate change the maturation process of the coffee fruits gets less and less uniform, requiring to harvest each lot additional times. As a producer, you’d want to employ your workforce as efficient and strategic as possible, so in the case of Finca Isabel, you would prioritize the harvest of the highest value cherries: Geisha.

So exploring new ways of growing, harvesting and processing specialty coffee is very important when facing the inoumerous challenges of smallholder coffee production. As roasters we are happy to share some of the risks of these experimental lots, share something new and exciting to our community of coffee lovers and give our producers feedback on their tests, so they can align their production to the market, all while coping with the rising challenges stemming from external factors.

Finca Isabel is located in the community of Loayza at an average elevation of 1750 masl, about one hour from Caranavi, Bolivia and is run by Fernando and Gabriela. Fernando comes from a local coffee producing family but studied agronomy at renowned Universities in Costa Rica and Honduras, after which he perfected his craft at Hacienda La Esmeralda in Panama where he met Gabriela, who is meticulously in charge of post harvest processing. The results are evident as they run their finca extremely quality focused and with some of the most innovative agroforestry techniques we have seen in Bolivia. The symbiosis between his coffee plants and its surroundings is eye opening and big birds can freely roam their microlots, even stealing some of the sweetest coffee cherries before harvest. This doesn’t bother them, as the biodiversity of the spot clearly helps the high quality of their coffees.

Sourcing directly at origin from small farmers, we are fully aware of the hard work that goes into the quality product we buy and the challenges their families face to earn their fragile livelihood. In this regard, coffee producing communities in Bolivia face additional challenges, due to the lack of infrastructure, financial support and difficult access to international freight routes. To fairly balance the relationship between roaster and producer we are price takers and as part of our long term commitment to a financially and environmentally sustainable coffee production in Bolivia, we factor these realities into the pricing.

For this 20Kg batch of specialty grade coffee, Fernando and Gabriela received 22,03 USD/Kg.