Colombia Marlon Bolaños Washed Bourbon Aji

Marlon Bolaños farms in Huila with his brothers Pedro and Hemerson, under the name 'The Three Coffee Farmers'. He grew up on the family's land but came to coffee seriously at seventeen, through SENA, Colombia's vocational training system, where he studied brewing, green grading and sensory analysis before going home to plant specialty varieties and run his own fermentations. He handles quality control, fermentation protocols and sampling now, while his brothers run the rest of the farm, and he competes as well, having won several barista and brewing competitions with spring water from the family land that people there call Champion's Water. This is the first coffee we have bought from him.

Pink florals explode off the aroma and carry into the first sip, and behind them lemonade opens the cup, sweet and tart at once. Pineapple builds through the middle, ripe and tropical, and as the cup cools fresh picked blackberry settles underneath it, that lightly tart, deeply sweet, juicy blue fruit giving the finish its weight. The cup is juicy and silky, the acidity is bright, and the sweetness builds the longer the cup sits.

Ají is Spanish for chili pepper, and the variety takes its name from the cherry, which is long and tapers to a point. Growers in Huila called it a Bourbon and the name stuck; genetic testing has since placed it in the Ethiopian landrace family, and it reached the wider market through Colombia's Cup of Excellence. The variety is known for floral aromatics and a high, fruit-driven acidity, and it asks for elevation and a long ripening to give them up, which is what Huila provides: nights are cold, ripening runs long and even, and the fruit builds sugar while it waits. The florals and the acidity in this cup are what that long ripening buys.

Cherry is picked at peak ripeness and floated to pull out anything low in density, then depulped the same day. The parchment ferments in open tanks for twenty-four hours, long enough for the mucilage to break down and wash away cleanly. The parchment is then washed and dried over ten to fifteen days. This is standard washed practice carefully run, and that is the intention of it: the variety and the elevation are what reach the cup, and you taste them in pink florals, lemonade, pineapple and blackberry, all of it fruit and all of it clean.