Honduras La Alita Orange Bourbon Natural

Coffee Profile

Continent: Central America

Country: Honduras

Farm: Finca La Alita

Process: Natural

Region: Comayagua

Variety: Orange Bourbon

Roast Scale

Light Medium Dark

---

 Taste Notes:

As filter coffee it is a lush, fruited cup. wisps of floral notes in the fragrance with tangerine and strawberry flavors in the cup. A fruity natural that at the same time allows tastes like a classic Central American washed bourbon with a buoyant acidity  and toasted almond notes.

This coffee also makes for a great espresso where it shows a syrupy cherry-like flavor and lemon as a straight shot which softens to orange and caramel with milk.

About Orange Bourbon

 The Bourbon variety is one of the two major cultivated varieties from which most coffee growing around the world today descends (The other being Typica) 

In 1718 seeds from Yemen were brought to the French colony on Reunion Island near Madagascar, The called Bourbon Island after the French House of Bourbon which ruled France at the time. Around 1860 plants from Reunion were brought to mainland Africa and to Brazil. The coffee depended from these plants came to be known as the Bourbon variety after the name of the island at that time.

Bourbon can still be found fairly commonly in Africa, Brazil, and some countries in Central America such as Guatemala and El Salvador.

The bourbon variety usually produces red fruit, but mutations have ocurred where the fruit color is yellow. There is a cultivated variety called Yellow Bourbon which is rarer but still not too uncommon which resulted from a natural cross of Red Bourbon and a Yellow fruited Typica plant called Yellow de Botucatu in Brazil in 1930 and was released commercially to growers in the early 1950's. 

And then there is Orange Bourbon, the origins of which are more murky. Any time there are red and yellow fruited trees in the same field it is possible to get some plants of an intermediary orange color or pink color.

As a cultivated variety Orange bourbon is exceedingly rare. Occasionally grown still on a handful of farms in El Salvador it is from there that the Mierisch family acquired seeds of the variety to plant on their farms in Nicaragua and Honduras. 

Orange bourbon has a cup profile in between red and yellow bourbon. It has the well balanced sweet cup of red bourbon, but a more delicate flavor profile of caramel and citrus that is more like yellow bourbon. 

 Finca La  Alita

Information from farm owner Erwin Mierisch

"Our Orange Bourbon seed stock comes from Nicaragua, more specifically from my
uncle’s farm, El Suspiro. My uncle, Alejandro Saldaña, who is originally from El
Salvador obtained his seeds from his home country, from the renowned Malacara
producers. 

My father, Erwin J. Mierisch, was head judge for COE in Honduras in 2011 and he
saw great potential in Honduran coffee. At the time Honduran coffee wasn’t
perceived or noticed for high-quality. The story on how we learned about Cerro
Azul is the following: After the Honduran COE my dad attended SCAE in 2011.
There he and Stephen Leighton of Has Bean UK were talking about the great
potential of Honduran coffee. Stephen jokingly said, “why do you just buy a coffee
farm in Honduras?” As luck would have it, later that night, an UTZ inspector came
up to them and mentioned he had accidentally overheard their conversation and
said he knew a producer in Honduras that was selling his farm. That farm was
Cerro Azul. The rest is history."

They later purchased the neighboring farm Santa Lucia, and the farm directly below that one called Lalita.

"La Alita (we changed it from Lalita as the family are Hendrix fans, as it means "Little Wing")  is actually located right behind Santa Lucia, and it sits at 1450-1550masl. It was first planted in 2014 when we bought it, and planted Orange Bourbon, Ethiosar, and Red Catuai."

Our natural lot was dried for 27 days total, 4 days on raised beds under 100% sunlight and moved every hour. It's then transported to raised beds inside our greenhouse under 50% shade for the other 23 days, moved 3 to 4 times in a day, until it reached 11% humidity. It's was then moved to the warehouse where it was allowed to rest for a month as whole dried cherry in order for the humidity to homogenize amongst all the beans.