ECUADOR ARNAUD CAUSSE TERRAZAS DEL PISQUE #954

Thanks to Charles Darwin, the small country of Ecuador is best known for its Galapagos Islands: a tropical eden of wildlife. It's exotic, but innocently so— no lions or tigers here, only peaceful tortoises enjoying their long, lazy lives. (Yes, that photo from Caravela Importers is a Galapagos tortoise under a coffee tree! Amazing.)

Ecuador isn’t a powerhouse of coffee production, but I always perk up when I see an Ecuadorian coffee on the menu. Maybe because of its small coffee industry, and its lack of commercialization, coffee from Ecuador has an untouched purity, a “mountain spring” feeling that echoes in its clean, sweet flavor profile of light citrus fruits, nutty roundness, delicate florals. It’s not a lion of a coffee, it’s more like a tortoise of coffee: sweet, innocent, magnetic. And as soon as I cupped the Ecuador Arnaud Causse from Stamp Act Coffee, I was drawn in.

The story of grower Arnaud Causse is a great one: born in the mountains of Provence, Arnaud was sent to work on a colonial coffee plantation in Gabon. Gabon doesn’t produce great coffee, but it lit a fire in Arnaud, who spent the next decade on coffee farms in Ethiopia, Rwanda, El Salvador, and Costa Rica, before bringing his own coffee seeds to Ecuador. Los Tolos, where his farm is located, is part of a sacred site to the indigenous Yumbos people: it’s the only valley with enough of a break in the clouds to see the moon.

This coffee is Cidra, or Sidra, varietal, a new hybrid only found in Ecuador, and making some real waves as a promising new bean with amazingly bright flavor. You’ll taste it in this cup: an aroma of red fruit, a honeycomb sweetness, a big sip of berries in the front. As it cools, you’ll taste peach nectar, an overlay of ruby grapefruit and bergamot, that smooth Ecuadorian citrus, with a honeysuckle floral that wraps everything in perfume and light. If I were judging this coffee at competition, it would earn a sky-high ~88-89 points easily, putting it at the very top of any cupping table.

I’ve only seen a couple Ecuadorian coffees this year, but none this good, and they all flew by so fast I barely had a chance to refill my cup. I am so excited to work with Stamp Act to reserve a small amount of this microlot, just for Bean Box customers. Available now, for a limited time, and at a really great price! Reserve your bag today, and don’t miss your chance to try this rare, special Cidra coffee from French agronomist Arnaud Causse and Ecuador’s moonlit Los Tolos valley.