Latin American Coffees Roaster Updates

Approachable and Delicious Coffee for All Styles

by Kevin Nealon February 12, 2016

We pride ourselves on offering coffees that are approachable and delicious for a wide variety of audiences. Yet we also seek out approachable with a twist - coffees that can please the more basic palates out there, but also pack eye-opening flavors that exceed expectations.

With the exception of a few outliers (Geshas, natural processed coffees, other rarities), almost any good and well-roasted Latin American coffee will be approachable. Typica and Bourbon-type coffee varieties and Latin American terroir create the chocolaty, nutty flavors that we've come to expect in coffee. The expected can be delicious, and some of our past and current Latin American coffees - Blue Orchid, Eriban Mendoza and Atitlán El Grano for example - stay close to the expected version of tasty.

Those coffees are great but we truly love when we can find a coffee that holds those approachable base flavors of chocolate, nuts, pastries, while also hitting the palate on the same fruit-forward level of some of our East African coffees. Don Manuel, Doña Lucinda, and starting this week, Alejandro Yucra - these are the Latin American coffees that get us excited as coffee roasters, because these are the coffees that can please your Blue Orchid drinkers and your Kenya Ngandu drinkers alike.

Alejandro Yucra has plenty of those approachable flavors of chocolate, hazelnut, and almond pastry. There have been a few cuppings this week when we've remarked that it's almost Ethiopian with its subtle florals, and juicy blackberry taste. There are plenty of factors that influence a coffee's complexity, but high altitude is unmistakably at work here. At 2100 meters above sea level, Alejandro Yucra's farm is one of the highest in the Huckleberry lineup. This high altitude means a huge temperature drop at nightfall, and coffee plants have to work harder to survive and deliver nutrients to their seeds. With all the other factors in place, this leads to a coffee bean with fruitier sweetness and more intense and complex acidity. In Alejandro Yucra, this presents itself as the best of two worlds - the sweet chocolate and nut flavors that make good Latin American coffees approachable, and blackberry brightness that's a pleasant surprise.