COLOMBIA LA ILUSION #1227

Curator's Notes

This cup has us doing a double take — a natural Colombian coffee from Cup of Excellence finalist, producer Rosevel Ortiz Escarpeta? We'll take front row seats to this light roast, please. La Ilusion begins the show with complex fruit flavors reminiscent of a light red wine. Sparkling mandarin orange dazzles and turns to strawberry jam. The creamy body makes way for a smooth dark chocolate finish, and we can't help but asking for an encore.

Roaster's Notes

$16.50/12oz from Batdorf & Bronson This coffee is a full natural process where the coffee cherry is dried on the seed. In this case, this is done on elevated beds over the course of 25 days. As a result, the cup is saturated with natural fruit flavors of raspberry and strawberry. Aromatically, the coffee can be floral and lavender-like. The body is creamy and has a lactic quality reminiscent of a fruit yogurt. Get this coffee while you can, it will not be around for long. Producer Rosevel Ortiz Escarpeta has been farming coffee on his small 12 acre farm “Finca La Ilusion” for over 20 years. The farm has become quite well known for producing some amazing quality and was a “Cup of Excellence” finalist in 2019. Many varieties of coffee are grown on the farm and this natural process lot is a blend of those, including Tabi, Caturra, and Castillo. Colombia was hit very hard by leaf rust in the mid 1980’s. At that time Cenicafe, a Colombian coffee research institute, set to work developing rust resistant coffee varieties. Both the Castillo and Tabi varieties are results of that research. While some wondered if the potential cup quality of these varieties would be compromised, blind taste testing has continued to prove these critics wrong.