Colombia Pink Bourbon

In the Cup: Amaretto, Fuji apple, and red grape flavors with sparkling acidity and mellow sugary sweetness.

Process: Natural

Farm: Finca Santa Bárbara

Variety: Pink Bourbon

Elevation: 1820 MASL

Country: Colombia

Harvest: May–August

Twenty minutes outside Popayán, in the municipality of Timbío, Finca Santa Bárbara grows 14 hectares of coffee alongside native trees, protected water sources, and plenty of birds. It's one of the farms behind Área 18, a project started in 2024 by Banexport and its partners with the goal of using every part of the coffee cherry — skin to bean — by 2030. Pink Bourbon is a rare cross of Red and Yellow Bourbon, and it's notoriously hard to grow true: the recessive genes behind that pink-salmon cherry get lost easily, so the pickers here only take cherries that have reached that exact color. At 1,820 meters in Cauca, one of Colombia's coolest growing regions, those cherries ripen slowly and build real sweetness.

Going natural puts all that sweetness to work. Instead of pulping the cherry before drying, the whole fruit dries wrapped around the bean, giving its sugars time to soak in. In a place as humid as Cauca, that's a careful job — dry it too slowly and the fruit turns on you — and getting it right is what keeps the cup clean instead of funky. That's why you get amaretto and Fuji apple up front, with red grape riding on sparkling acidity and a mellow, sugary finish.