Luis Octavio ~ Pink Bourbon | Huila, Colombia

Producer

Luis Octavio Titimbo has always been a coffee person. His two parcels of land outside Bruselas are home to Caturra, Variedad Colombia, Ají, Sidra, and Ombligón (gifted from Ildefonso) and this Pink Bourbon. He’s begun keeping bees to improve farm health (and for the honey of course), and though he’s still on conventional fertilizers, he’s actively planning a vermiculture project and strategizing on how to fully embrace a wholistic organic agriculture strategy (something much of the Guacharos group are actively practicing, so he’ll have the support!). He’s already using de-pulped coffee husks as fodder for compost fertilizer, mixing yeast, whey, cane sugar and local yeasts and worms to break it down. So he’s well on the way.

Variety

A suspected escapee of the Cenicafé hybrid seed trials of the 1960s-80s, a the name, this variety is closer genetically to an ancestral landrace from Ethiopia.

more on the journal

Processing

Luis’s processing technique seems to promote complex fruits that remind us of ataulfo or honey mangoes. So many of our test V60 brews had mango as the main attraction, and supporting flavours like round vanilla and bright pink berries. This is, in our opinion, an exceptional washed processed Pink Bourbon. His strategy is similar to Beto’s, except his fermentations are a little more drawn out. Whole fruit in a hermetically sealed bag for 24hrs followed by another 60-80hrs in a low O2 environment after depulping gives beneficial microbes layers of opportunity to do their thing, and seems to result in fruit forward complexity. This take on Pink Bourbon from Luis Octavio is a joy to work with.