Colombia Huila Monteblanco "Carabao Mango" Yeast Co-ferment

Tasting Note:  Fruit Tea | Mango Juice | Maple Syrup

 Size:  200g/1kg

Brewing Recommendation: Filter Brews / Modern Espresso 

This coffee drinks like mango juice with maple syrup sweetness underneath, because producer Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia co-fermented the pulped coffee for roughly 180 hours with a cultured mango-and-yeast "mother culture" before it was processed as a fully washed coffee (all pulps, flesh and mucilage removed at the time of drying).

The grower

Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia is a third-generation farmer at Finca Monteblanco, in San Adolfo (Vereda La Tocora), municipality of Acevedo, in the Huila highlands of southern Colombia. He's known for designer co-fermentation lots, and this is one of them. The farm harvests twice a year, June to July and October to November.

How it's fermented

This is the engine of the cup. Over about eight days, a "mother culture" of cultivated microbes (Lactobacillus plus Saccharomyces cerevisiae, the same yeast behind bread and beer) is built up and fed with panela and mango, a bit like a sourdough starter grown for coffee instead of bread. That live culture inoculates the pulped coffee, which then ferments in sealed tanks with a mango solution for around 180 hours. The sugar level and pH are held inside a tight window so the fruit layers on top of the coffee's base rather than burying it. Only then is the lot fully washed and dried slowly for 20 to 25 days.

The varietal

Caturra is a natural dwarf mutation of Bourbon found in Brazil about a century ago, capable of good cup quality at altitude but famously vulnerable to leaf rust. Red Caturra is the form that dominates Colombian planting, and on its own it leans toward chocolate, grapefruit and berry sweetness. It's a clean, dependable workhorse, which is the whole point: the ferment is what turns an ordinary cup into this one.

In the cup

Expect mango juice out front, maple syrup sweetness sitting underneath (closer to gula melaka than to anything you'd pour on pancakes), and a fruit-tea lift on the finish. It reads as layered rather than artificial, which is exactly what holding that fermentation window is for.

For the discerning cup: order a bag online and taste exactly what Rodrigo's mango co-ferment does to a clean Huila Caturra.