PABLO GUERRERO

Hacienda El Obraje sits on the slope of a dormant volcano in Tangua, in the far south of Nariño, between 2000 and 2300 masl. For generations the Guerrero family grew wheat here. When cheap imports made grain unviable, Pablo Andrés Guerrero, an architect from Pasto, bet the land on coffee and was one of the first in the area to plant it. Of nearly 90 hectares he keeps only around 35 in coffee and has turned the rest into a natural forest reserve, planting trees to protect the microclimate of the whole farm. Days reach 32 °C at noon and nights fall to 8 °C or lower, and that swing builds dense beans with a clean, layered acidity. In 2021 his washed Geisha won the Colombia Cup of Excellence with 90.61 points, and his lots are still chosen by competitors around the world. We first roasted El Obraje in 2023 and keep coming back.

Pink Bourbon is a good reminder that names in coffee are not always facts. Farmers in southern Huila noticed trees in their Bourbon plots whose cherries ripened pink instead of red, and they did the obvious thing and called them Pink Bourbon. For years the trade repeated the idea that it was a cross between Red and Yellow Bourbon. The genetics told a different story. When DNA Analytica tested it in 2017, and RD2 Vision looked again in 2023 with more samples from Colombia and Costa Rica, the plant lined up with wild Ethiopian coffee, not with Bourbon, and not with Geisha either. Somewhere along the way an Ethiopian landrace found its way into the Colombian Andes and settled in. Once you know that, the cup makes sense. In a good lot we taste white flowers, red fruit and citrus, with a sweetness that feels almost like juice, a profile much closer to a fine washed Ethiopian than to the round, chocolate leaning Bourbons. It is not an easy plant to farm and the trees are anything but uniform, but the producers who grow it well, many of them small farms in Huila and Nariño, have turned it into one of the most exciting coffees coming out of Colombia today.

The washed process is the cleanest and most precise way to prepare coffee, and the one that lets a single origin and variety speak most clearly. Every trace of fruit and sticky mucilage is stripped away before the bean is dried, usually by fermenting it loose in tanks and rinsing it off with water, or by scrubbing it away mechanically. Because no fruit is left touching the bean as it dries, nothing masks the raw character of the coffee itself. That is why the washed method is trusted for the finest lots, showing off clarity, bright lively acidity, and the clear stamp of where the coffee was grown.