Colombia La Margarita Supercritical CO2 "Peach & Petal"

Tasting Note:  Floral | Peach | Honey | Fructose

 Size:  200g/1kg

Brewing Recommendation: Filter Brews / Modern Espresso 

Expect honeyed sweetness, concentrated and clean, wrapped in floral, peachy lift: that is the signature of this Castillo which underwent supercritical CO2 + Raisin Anaerobic Washed process. The clever bit is that the ripe cherry is dried down to a raisin before fermentation, so the seed drinks the sweet ferment liquid back in rather than rinsing it away.

The producer

It comes from Café Granja La Esperanza, the family-run Colombian specialty producer widely credited as the first to bring Geisha to the country. The lot is grown in Quindío, one of the three departments of Colombia's Eje Cafetero (the Coffee Triangle), whose coffee landscape is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Here the trees sit at 1,700 to 1,800m on the rich volcanic soils that give the region its reputation.

The varietal

Castillo is Colombia's workhorse: bred over decades by the national coffee research centre Cenicafé and released in 2005, it crosses Caturra with the Timor Hybrid (an Arabica and Robusta cross), which hands it built-in resistance to coffee leaf rust. Think of it as a tougher immune system in plant form. It now makes up roughly 45% of Colombia's crop, the sort of everyday variety nobody writes poetry about. Which is rather the point of what happens next.

How it's processed

In a Raisin Anaerobic Washed process, the whole ripe cherry is first dried to a raisin form by driving off its free water. Then it ferments in sealed tanks where raisined cherry re-absorbs that fermentation liquid, carrying the sweet fruit essence into the seed instead of washing it off and discarding it the way traditional washing does. Anaerobic ferments like this tend to build pronounced sweetness and clear fruit character, which is exactly what landed in the cup.

In the cup

The recorded notes are floral, peach, honey and fructose: a perfumed, fruit-forward profile that earns the "Peach & Petal" name. That honeyed sweetness sits somewhere near gula melaka in spirit, deep and rounded rather than sharp. It is proof that an everyday variety, given a clever process, can become a coffee with character.

Order a bag online, dial in a gentle pour-over, and let that honeyed sweetness open up: this Castillo rewards a brewer who pays attention.