Colombia Tatiana Pete Washed Maragesha

Finca La Rosi is Tatiana Pete's farm in La Plata, in western Huila, where her coffee grows at 1,700 meters, and this lot is her washed Maragesha, a variety first found elsewhere in Huila that is still grown by relatively few farms in Colombia and has only reached export in the last few years. It came to us through KWC and Juan Diaz, who we work with closely and through whom we buy much of our Colombian coffee.

Sencha opens the cup, green and lightly savory with the fresh sweetness of steeped leaves, and ripe pear follows close behind it, juicy and soft, carrying most of the sweetness through the middle. Lime brings the acidity, bright and clean at the edges of the cup, and as it cools strawberry comes forward, red and sweet, sitting on top of the tea. The texture is light and silky, the finish is long, and the tea character holds from the first sip to the last.

Maragesha is a natural cross of Gesha and Maragogype, and it carries the floral, tea-like clarity that made Gesha famous together with the large seed of Maragogype, the giant-bean mutation of Typica first found in Brazil in 1870. It was first identified in 2017 by Luis Aníbal Calderón at Finca Villa Betulia in Acevedo, Huila, when a few trees on his farm began setting cherries unlike anything else he grew, and he planted out their seed until the variety could be grown as a crop, and from Huila it has since spread to a small number of farms across Colombia. Both parents are modest yielders, so the producers who plant it are planting for the cup, and a washed lot is where the variety is easiest to taste.

This lot is washed, so the fruit comes off before the seed dries: ripe cherries are sorted and pulped, the parchment ferments until the sticky mucilage around it breaks down, and then it is washed clean and laid out to dry to a stable moisture before it rests and ships. This is standard washed practice carefully run, and because so little fruit is left on the seed, the cup comes from the variety and from how well the cherry was picked and sorted, which here gives sencha, pear, lime and strawberry, clean and sweet the whole way down.