Nectarine, orange blossom, and candied pineapple

This coffee comes to us from Finca Las Flores, a 70-hectare farm near San Isidro in the Huila region of Colombia. The farm is owned and run by the Vergara family, with 4th generation producer, Johan, assuming more responsibility from his father, Edilberto.

Since 2017, the focus for Finca Las Flores has been a move away from the production of conventional coffees to a higher quality and differentiated offering. This has involved the introduction of new varieties including pink bourbon, tabi, and sidra, as well as the development and deployment of new, more experimental techniques for fermenting and drying the coffees.

While the more exotic varieties are trickier to grow, and the experimental processing techniques are riskier and more labour-intensive, the resulting coffees are strikingly different from the conventional production, and are often able to fetch significantly higher prices at market.

While we have a very clear preference for more regionally-relevant varieties and processing techniques, preferring the clarity, flavour, and sense-of-place that they offer, this coffee stood out to us on a recent cupping table, and we were drawn to exploring it further.

The variety here is tabi — a cultivar developed for release in 2002 by the Colombian National Federation of Coffee Growers. The cultivar was intended to be a more disease-resistant combination of bourbon, typica, and timor that retained the pleasing flavour profiles of those varieties.

For us, this coffee presents as a floral, syrupy, and expressive cup, tasting gently of ripe nectarine, fresh orange blossom, and a sweet, candied pineapple finish.

This is the first time we’ve purchased from Finca Las Flores, and have done so through import partners, Cofinet.