Colombia - Luis Camacho's Fragancia
About this Product
Another LaREB banger and one we're particularly excited about. Luis Edgar Camacho produces coffee at Finca La Palma in Palestina, a municipality in southern Huila that is easily one of our favourite microregions in Colombia.
This lot is "Fragencia" - a cultivar reported to be another variety that has come out of the Nestlé breeding centre in Ecuador as Sidra and Mejorado - perhaps even sharing genetics with these varieties. We're investigating further, as we were blown away on a blind cupping table with the quality of this lot. [UPDATE 05/03/26 - The testing is back! Read on to find out what it is!]
We have two harvests of this coffee - the fly crop and main crop - which we're going to run sequentially.
Brew Guide:
Best Brewed with: Filter
Lightest Roaster Influence: A short roast with higher heat application throughout, we've kept the end temperature slightly lower but balanced with a slightly longer development time to really emphasise the bright florality. Light, even for us
Best Rested: 3-4 weeks
Filter: 62g/L & 96°C, with rest we like to move down to 93°C
Espresso: Turbo shots + 3 weeks rest. 18g/48g+ & 20s
We’re tasting: Orange blossom, pomegranate and lychee aromatics. In the cup it’s juicy and unctuous - we’re getting lime curd, ripe lychee (almost rambutan) and honeydew melon, alongside ripe summer berries and white sugar. Super complex - as it cools we get peach, oolong, orange & lime boiled sweets, and a hint of fresh basil leaf.
Traceability
Country of Origin: |
Colombia |
Region: |
Santa Barbara, Palestina, Huila |
Producer: |
Luis Edgar Camacho |
Farm: |
La Palma |
Variety: |
Fragancia [Sidra x Catimor] |
Elevation: |
1720 MASL |
Process: |
Traditional Washed: |
Import Partner: |
LaREB |
Harvest |
Fly Crop 25/26, Arrived UK: 02/12/25. New Purchasing Relationship.
|
The Story
UPDATE:
We sent a bean sample off to RD2 Vision for genetic fingerprinting - the results have come back. Fragancia is likely a hybrid of Sidra [Ethiopian landrace] x Catimor [Disease resistant Timor Hybrid x Caturra cross]. It's definitely got some of that Sidra cup profile - the basil hint in the finish is a real tell, but none of the Allium taste you can oft find in Sidras.
Luis Edgar Camacho's father spent years picking cherry on other people's farms to save enough to buy the land that would become Finca La Palma. He passed away not long after acquiring the property, leaving Luis Edgar's mother to raise the family and keep the farm running. She still cultivates her own plots on adjacent land, and the siblings built a house on the property to remain close to her. Today Luis Edgar farms La Palma with his wife Ledy and sons Jairo and Stiven, and the operation is small enough that only one or two additional pickers are brought on during harvest.
Palestina sits where the Central and Eastern Cordilleras converge at the Macizo Colombiano, at the gateway to Cueva de los Guácharos, Colombia's first national park. The municipality is known locally as the water and forest factory of Huila, a reference to the network of streams and watersheds fed by the Río Guarapas. The volcanic soils and cloud forest proximity produce coffees that tend to differ from the rest of the department, leaning brighter and more delicate.
Luis Edgar was introduced to LaREB through long-term partner Lizardo Herrera and has remained a key part of the group since joining. His first foray into the speciality export market came through Caravela in 2014, and the transition to working with LaREB marked a further step into higher-end lot separation and varietal experimentation.
The Nestlé breeding facility in Pichincha province is now closed, but the lab is understood to have worked with imported Ethiopian germplasm across a range of breeding objectives from hybrid development and backcrossing to the stabilisation and selection of promising genetic lines. A field technician named Don Olger Rogel is widely credited with identifying two of the most successful selections from the programme and disseminating them to farms across Ecuador, naming them Sidra and Typica Mejorado, both of which have since been subject to genetic testing that has complicated their identities considerably, with World Coffee Research finding that Sidra does not have a clear genetic identity and may refer to several distinct varieties grouped under the same name, while Typica Mejorado appears to carry no Typica genetics at all. As a matter of preference, where genetic testing has shown that a variety does not belong to the lineage implied by its full name, we drop the prefix for semantic accuracy, referring to Bourbon Rosado as Rosado, Typica Mejorado as Mejorado, Caturra Chiroso as Chiroso, and so on, even where the full name remains in common use at origin.
What this coffee is, we cannot yet say with any certainty. This is only the second time we have encountered Fragencia, both times from the same exporter, and we have sent samples off for genetic testing ourselves - though it could come back as Chiroso, a localised hybrid, an Ethiopian landrace, or something else entirely.
What we do know is that it tastes unlike anything else we have cupped from those lineages and we're very excited to find out what it is.
