Maragogipe Natural • Filter • Black Grapes, Meyer Lemon, Juicy
Now with new & lighter roast profile!
To switch things up from the last harvest, this time we choose the Maragogipe variety from Rocío & Nolberto’s Finca. Less diffused than the Pacamara, it shares the same traits as its descendant: gigantic beans, full of complex flavors that you don’t get often together in coffee. After the experience with their Pacamara, we fine tuned our roast even more to this particularly challenging bean, bringing out powerful notes of black grapes, mango, meyer lemons, blueberries and cinnamon.
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Variety: Maragogipe
Post harvest processing: Natural
Producer: Rocío & Nolberto
Microlot: Kenia
Elevation: 1300 masl
Location: Uchumachi, Caranavi Province, BoliviaNet weight: 125 or 250 grams whole beans
Roasted for: Filter -
Processing and roasting the Maragogipe beans, is a challenge in itself. Natural processed beans are always harder to mill as the machine needs to get rid not only of the parchment, but also of the dried sticky pulp and skin. What makes it even harder with this variety, is its huge size! It’s easily double the size of a Caturra and even way bigger than a Geisha bean! Requiring the milling machine to be specifically adjusted to this. Also, the usual screen sizes don’t really work properly and therefore need to be custom made. On top of all that, it’s weird uneven coloring, makes it very hard for the plant workers to select out the visual defects and many passes of manual selection are needed to get to a satisfactory result. With the experience of last year’s Pacamara, the plant did a great job when selecting this years batch of Maragogipe, allowing us to find a very homogenous roast profile that translate into a very clean and nicely balanced cup taking into account the particular flavors of this variety. The spiciness you’ll detect in the cup might be unusual at the beginning but it is one of the characteristic traits setting these two varieties apart.
Tip: don’t feed the whole dose of coffee beans into your electrical grinder at once as they might get stuck in the collar.
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Rocío & Nolberto’s farm Finca Kenia is located in the community of Uchumachi, a longer drive away from Caranavi. Their farm is named after their daughter Kenia, which has less to do with the African country but more with a processing method they’re keen of. Although it’s elevation is not as high as the other farms we’re sourcing our coffee from, they make it up with a fertile land and lots of sunshine that helps immensely with the natural drying process of the beans as those will be drying more evenly. Especially with bigger beans such as the Pacamara & Maragogipe varieties they’re specialized in, this is key. Through the high price we paid last year for their Pacamara lot we invested heavily in the partnership with them and couldn’t be more proud of the work they did this year! By paying fair prices for quality green coffee, farmers are able to reinvest back into their business, in this particular case, Rocío & Nolberto were able to invest in more drying beds to scale their production all while maintaining quality. So be ready to get more great coffee from them in the future!
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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 40Kg batch of specialty grade coffee, Rocío and Nolberto received 12 USD/Kg.
