Colombia Las Brisas is grown by nine farmers in the municipality of Rioblanco, in the southwestern-most tip of Colombia’s Tolima Department. Coffee is grown throughout Colombia, but all of Huckleberry’s offerings of the past year have come from the Southwestern area of the country. Colombia is one of the few coffee-growing countries with two harvests, and this particular lot comes from the smaller October-December harvest, known as the Mitaca or Fly-Crop.
Colombia Las Brisas is unique in that the nine farmers mill, wash, and dry their coffee individually, at their farms. Most other smallholder coffees are picked and delivered in its cherry to a centralized washing station, where it is processed collectively. Individual processing can create challenges for consistency and quality, but all of the farmers who make up Colombia Las Brisas are well-practiced in proper fermentation, washing, and drying their coffees on raised beds for slow, even drying and under greenhouse-like cover for protection from Colombia’s rains.*
Welcome to my Table, here in the corner of this cafe. Today we’re sipping the Colombia Las Brisas, from PERC Coffee in Savannah, Georgia. Feel free to pull up a chair.
THEDETAILS
origin: Rioblanco, Tolima, Colombia
farm: N/A
producer: Jose Gustavo Quintero, Ernesto Quintavio, Julio Ernesto Vasquez Quieto, Hernan Roberto Arias, Heiber Hernandez Perez, Nolberto Ñanguma Uribe, Ernesto Osorio, Luz Mila Rico, Jose Ider Zapata Quiñones, and their respective families
association: N/A
elevation: 1500 – 1900 meters above sea level
cultivars: Caturra, Castillo, Typica
process: fully washed, raised bed dried
certifications: standard
CUPPINGNOTES
The aroma coming off this Colombia Las Brisas is intensely fragrant; sweet, perfumed, and somewhat lively with scents of sugar brownings, fruit, and a bouquet of florals. Vanilla, caramel, stone fruit, honeysuckle, and rose petal.
The flavor follows the nose, and my first few sips present my palate with a sweet, supple, medium-bodied coffee. It’s also a very compact, concentrated, dense coffee; which is to say that it lacks clarity—its profile is a melange of flavors all presented at once. It takes a discerning palate to pick out and identify its individual elements. Obviously that’s not to say that this isn’t a good coffee; this coffee is incredible. Initially, it has a pretty creamy mouthfeel and showcases sweet, sugary flavors of vanilla, salted caramel, nougat, candied roasted pecan, graham cracker pie crust, and baking spices. That’s quickly followed up by a deluge of juicy fruits: plum, apricot, peach, raisin, date, red grape, some hints of green apple, and a mellow clementine acidity. The finish is clean, and the coffee leaves behind a lingering aftertaste with nuances of vanilla cream and honeysuckle.
Medium body; supple mouthfeel; citric acidity; clean finish.
FINALTHOUGHTS
PERC Coffee, once again, dazzles the palate with their Colombia Las Brisas. This was an incredibly flavorful, delightful, and complex coffee; one that threw an awful lot at the palate, but didn’t overwhelm it. A buoyant, supple coffee that presents with sweet sugar brownings, baking spices, and lively fruit flavors, Colombia Las Brisas is a real treat.
*content provided by Huckleberry Roasters
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Andrew is a husband, father, dog lover, craft beverage enthusiast, content creator, and niche market Internet celebrity. Formerly of A Table in the Corner of the Cafe and The Pulitzer Project and contributor to Barista Magazine and Mental Floss, he’s been writing on the Internet for years.