Roast: Light 

Country: Costa Rica

Region: Biolley

Producer: Coffea Diversa

Processing: Honey

Altitude: 1250-1300masl

Taste:

A delicate cup with vibrant acidity. Subtle notes of melon, malt, clove, and rambutan. Hints of orange and black tea in the finish.

Coffea Diversa

Gonzalo Hernandez has amassed the world’s largest private collection of coffees trees: more than two hundred species, botanical varieties, mutations and cultivars that grow on his exotic Costa Rican “coffee garden”, Coffea Diversa. His collection includes some of the rarest in the world -- coffees many have neither heard of nor tasted.

Of each variety Gonzalo has only a few trees, and his coffees are sold in small 10 kilogram bags to knowledgeable roasters and friends around the world, first come, first serve. We first visited Coffea diversa and met Gonzalo in 2010 and we’ve been looking forward to sharing his coffees ever since.

While there are hundreds of varieties that have been collected from coffee's homeland in the mountains of Ethiopia, only a handful of these have ever been commercially cultivated.   Only the Geisha/Gesha and Java varieties are currently planted in any significant scale. Many others exist and Coffea diversa has a collection of dozens not being grown anywhere else. 

Dilla Alghe 

 A wild Ethiopian landrace found close to the southwestern Ethiopian town of Dilla Alghe. This coffee is characterized by being a tall tree, wide branch spacing, wide branch-bud spacing. Young leaves or tips are reddish in colour. Large, long beans. Its yield is very poor. The plant is very susceptible to diseases.

Dilla Alghe was collected by Major A.R. Melville from Dilla Alghe, Southwestern  Ethiopia and brought back to his home in Kenya in 1942 after returning from his service in Ethiopia during World War II as part of the British East African Forces.  He would later go on to be Director of Agriculture in Kenya and also introduced the Dalle variety at the same time, while others returning brought back to Kenya varieties such as the Rume Sudan variety.

In 1953 the USDA imported this variety from Kenya (February 16. PEI:205408) and along with dozens of other selections (like the now famous Geisha/Gesha variety) from Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. USDA then sent them to the then newly created coffee germplasm collection at CATIE(Centro Agronomico Tropical de Investigacion y Ensenanza) in Turrialba, Costa Rica. (Introduction T.2742) Because some selections from this plant showed tolerance to the Coffee Leaf Rust Disease.  It was later sent to other countries collections for further study. Brazil in 1953, and Colombia in 1954. It was also sent to the Rust research Center CIFC in Portugal where they selected plant 128/2 for rust resistance. This variety like most  Ethiopian Land races was never commercially grown due to its poor yields and weak disease resistance compared to the Robusta based Timor-Hybrid selections being developed at the time. 

Today only a handful of farms grow this variety, and to our knowledge Coffea Diversa was the first to grow it commercially.