Colombia - Aponte Honey

Coffees from the Inga community in Aponte town in Nariño have built up an excellent reputation, for good reason. With extremely high altitudes for Colombia (2100 MASL+), the town has specialised in producing Honey process lots as the conditions suit the drying process. With consistent quality, decent production and a specific style, it is a distinct regional style and "taste of place" (we ban use of the T word in our copy, but perhaps - PERHAPS - it could almost be justified here).

We're running this absolute belter as both a house filter and secondary Facility component, and while it might be an absolute classic, well known coffee - it's sometimes fun to take those on and provide our own spin on it. We think this is a style of lot that while it could absolutely shine at a "lightest" roaster influence, it really holds its own - and infact shows wonderful qualities - when developed further.

Brew Guide:

Best Brewed with: Filter and Classic Espresso (House Filter Omni)

Best Rested: 3+ weeks

Filter: 64g/L, 96°C when fresh; 92°C when rested

Espresso: 18g/45g/28-32s

We're tasting: Rich dark fruit aromatics - blackberry jam, pomegranate molasses and dried strawberry. In the cup it's got a dense body and sticky sweet character, like toffee apples, date syrup, dried cherries, and black tea. As it cools becoming distinctly milk chocolate forward, with stewed apples and rich brown butter finish.

Traceability

The Story

When we set out to build our house filter range, we needed coffees that could deliver consistently excellent daily drinking while supporting meaningful change in coffee-growing regions. This lot comes from the Resguardo Indígena Inga de Aponte, an Inga community in the highlands of northern Nariño, via our pals at Ally coffee, with whom we've worked since our very first week.

Caturra is a compact natural mutation of Bourbon, and across much of Colombia it has been replaced by rust-resistant cultivars such as Castillo, Variedad Colombia, and Sarchimor. In Aponte it is still grown alongside them, near the upper limit of where coffee will grow in the country, where cooler conditions reduce rust pressure and the trees mature slowly with small seeds, a trait once discounted by local intermediaries (Colombian "Supremo" - the higher grade commercial coffee - is partly dictated by the larger screen size of the beans) and later valued by speciality buyers. We're mega fans of the profile Caturra presents when grown at higher altitudes, as we mentioned in our last Peruvian season, and while this further north - this high Andean Caturra is very much of the same ilk.

The resguardo spans the high slopes of the Juanambú canyon within the Colombian Massif, near the Doña Juana volcanic complex, with much of its upper ground held by the community as protected páramo and lagoon. The Inga describe themselves as "wuasikamas" - carers of the territory, and in the early 2000s chose through their own assemblies to remove the illicit crops (read: opium poppy and coca) that had brought armed groups into the area, rebuilding their language, governance and legal livelihoods, with coffee production as a major focus.

Since 2015 ground movement has forced families from the old town of Aponte, and the community has insisted that any resettlement remain within the resguardo, a process that is still under way. Most producers in Aponte dry their coffee with the mucilage left on, on raised beds under cover, a low technical intervention approach that uses little water, which the local cooperative links to the community's regard for water. We're featuring this coffee with more development - both as a single origin house filter which we tend to push a little harder, and as part of Facility V17 and roasted for espresso.

While a little fruiter than the typical coffees we feature for house filter (in theory, atleast - since we'll have African coffees lined up for the winter), we think this coffee has oodles of sticky dried fruit and syrupy sugar notes that make it absolutely chuggable black and more than ok to add some milk to, and it's that easy going nature that defines our house filter range more than anything.