Carlos Guamanga ~ Pink Bourbon | Huila, Colombia
US$23.75
In stock
Producer: Carlos Guamanga
Place: Huila, Colombia
Variety: Pink Bourbon
Processing: Washed Process
Harvest: February 2025
Cup profile: crisp and clean, pomelo & melon type fruitiness, black tea, and slight cotton candy note.
Pink Bourbon from Carlos Guamanga’s farm, El Recuerdo, in Bruselas, Huila. Washed processing typical of the region, Carlos processes using both whole-cherry & depulped fermentations in sealed barrels, resulting in a crisp and clean profile with a lovely pomelo & melon type fruitiness, black tea, and a slight cotton candy note.
It’s an absolute joy to be back in touch with Carlos and his sweet family after many years of trying to get something to line up, finally we’ve got a foot in the door! On a little catchup convo on whatsapp it was incredible to see how much his kids have grown, and how sharp they both are. His eldest daughter, now a teenager, is working as a barista at a well regarded cafe in Pitalito run by someone I know from way back, Gustavo. The onesie I brought for Carlos and Patricia’s youngest when he was a newborn is a distant memory – now this kid is solving rubiks cubes in a minute flat (we saw the video evidence lol). The primary farm they had, El Recuerdo, now has an annex called La Esperanza, and with both, they now have a combined 3 hectares with coffee and the other half with food crops and forest. When I first knew Carlos, he was on the board of the Guacharos group in its inception, but he’s since decided to narrow his focus a bit.
Carlos just wants to nerd out on coffee and raise a family. He’s been doing that, incredibly well, in Bruselas for many years now. His drying beds are kitted out with Arduino boards and fans connected to temperature and relative humidity sensors. A squirrel is so comfortable during my last visit that it treats us like playground equipment, friendly and probably looking for a treat. At least four or five kinds of birds call through the hills planted with Caturra (these days it’s more Pink Bourbon). It’s a beautiful place to do creative, long-term work.
About Carlos and El Recuerdo
Carlos Guamanga is originally from the Department of Cauca but has lived and cultivated coffee in Pitalito, Huila for the last 15 years, alongside his wife Patricia who is from the very ridgeline where the family now lives. Carlos and his uncle Hermes perform the required, year-round farm chores together. La Esperanza spans a total area of one hectare, all of which is planted with coffee, and El Recuerdo is a total of five hectares, with two currently producing coffee. Carlos has about 4,000 trees per hectare and has 5,000 Caturra trees, 7,000 Pink Bourbon trees, 1000 Yellow Bourbon trees, and 500 Tabis. Besides coffee, he grows plantain, yucca, and corn for the consumption of his five-person family and the additional ten workers that come from Cauca to work the cherry collection year after year.
Processing
This washed Pink Bourbon micro lot was carefully processed using a multistep beneficio or post-collection processing. After the cherry was hand-selected, it was fermented for 24 hours in cherry form, de-pulped and fermented for 60 hours, rinsed once, then put out to dry on raised beds and then transferred to a parabolic dryer for 20 days to finish the drying.
About Pink Bourbon
Known as Bourbon Rosado in Colombia, this is an Ethiopian Landrace variety, rumoured to be a part of variety trials in a state breeding program decades ago in Colombia and grown by many farmers within and outside Colombia today.
