Kiss the Hippo Coffee - Colombia, Los Vascos

Tasting Notes: Caramel, Green Apple, Honey.
Recommended for filter.

Los Vascos is a community lot made up of a small collection of farms near Bilbao in Colombia. The farms that make up this coffee are incredibly similar—usually only a couple hectares or so in size and all family run, the producers create a coffee with the same signature soft acidity and round sweetness. Each producer’s small lots are pooled together based on their flavour profile which is identified at the daily tastings held at the co-operative mill. This lot was created specifically to be a crowd pleasing easy to drink coffee, something everyone will love.

The thing that allows the diverse group of producers in Bilbao to create such a uniform lot is their usage of the same cultivars: caturra, Colombia and castillo. Cultivars are the different kinds of coffee plants, like how granny smith or red delicious apples can completely change the experience when you taste them. Cultivars are also artefacts of history—caturra was the traditional cultivar of Colombia before a fungus called rust killed most of it off. The government then released a cultivar named Colombia at the height of the crisis, bred to be resistant to the fungus. It held out for years until a second crisis hit, and in response to this castillo was released. Now farms across Colombia have a collection of the cultivars, all usually mixed together. Lessons from the agroforestry world tell us that there’s a strength in this genetic diversity—each farm having many different cultivars can help to avoid the next crisis