Photo: Jasmine Chavez
July marks our 12th year of doin things. Roasting coffee, buying coffee, sharing coffee, and other coffee stuffs. There’s no way we’re doing this alone, so we wanted to take a moment to shout out everyone who’s made these 12 years possible.
From the producers who grow the coffee, to the roastery team who turns it brown and the Insomnia baristas who turn it liquidy, and of course to our customers who’ve been supporting us along the way (whether you sip our bevies in our cafes, brew up our beans at home, or choose us to be your trusty wholesale partner) we are all part of a global crew of individuals whose time, energy, care, passion, intention, etc etc etc etc etc etc all result in a bag of roasted coffee or a drink that we are all proud to serve and enjoy. You know how we feel about windows. We are here 12 years later because of all of you. Thank you.
To celebrate our big day, we wanted to showcase a fun coffee, but more importantly, a meaningful one. Through our sourcing partner, Shared Source, we’ve been buying coffee for the past seven years from a group of producers in Huila, Colombia, called Los Guácharos. (“WA-char-ohs” for our fellow gringos reading along.) They’ve been a constant presence on our coffee menu over the years, and the group leader, Edilma Piedrahita, has become a recognizable name for our staff and customers. This group has been a meaningful part of the DW story for years, so we figured we’d celebrate with a coffee from Miller Ñañez, (pronounced "me-air") one of their newest members.
Los Guácharos absolutely rules for several reasons. Not only is their coffee consistently delicious, but the group members are all actively working towards more and more organic farming practices (which we love!) They make their own fertilizers, fungicides, and water filtration systems which use natural resources like stones and sand to clean up the water used for coffee processing to minimize pollution. The fertilizer that they make is called super magro - a stinky/sweet and beautiful fermentation made up of organic materials and microorganisms collected from virgin soils. This super magro improves soil health, reduces farmers’ costs, and helps protect coffee plants from some diseases.
Let’s zoom in a little bit and talk about this coffee’s variety, pink bourbon. “Pink” because the cherries ripen to a pretty pink(ish orange) color, and “bourbon” because people originally (and mistakenly) thought it to be a cross/mutation between the yellow and red bourbon varieties. For those of you who don’t know, bourbon is considered to be “one of the most culturally and genetically important varieties in the world”, according to World Coffee Research. Anyways, turns out that pink bourbon is actually more directly related to Ethiopian landrace varieties than to bourbon. To quote World Coffee Research again (can you tell we’re big fans of WCR?) “a landrace is a domesticated, locally adapted, traditional variety … that has developed over time, through adaptation to its natural and cultural environment of agriculture and pastoralism, and due to isolation from other populations of the species.” Kinda like how we in the US use the word ‘heirloom’.
The important detail here is the history of these varieties and how they got to where they are today. The bourbon lineage begins with Ethiopian landraces that were taken from Ethiopia, went through Yemen, then onwards to Réunion Island (named ‘Bourbon’ in the past - get it, ‘Bourbon’?) and finally into Latin America where they became parents of several sub-varieties such as caturra, SL28, mundo novo, and others. Despite the name, pink bourbon is NOT one of these sub-varieties. Instead of descending from this limited subset of Ethiopian landraces as part of this bourbon lineage, pink bourbon is more directly related to Ethiopian landraces; it arrived in Latin America without taking its sweet time touring around Yemen or Réunion. Anyways, we don’t work with Café Imports, but they put out a very thorough and informative blog post about this that we highly recommend.
This is the first time we’ll have this variety on our menu at D-dub, but we’ve tried a bunch in the past and it’s one of our absolute favorites. In our opinion, pink bourbons embody the perfect balance of delicate, nuanced and fancy floral and fruity notes with the crowd pleasing go-to chocolatey and caramely coffee-coffee notes that we've all grown to love.
Let’s zoom in just a lil bit more to get an idea of what Miller did with this coffee once he picked all the pink ripe cherries back in October and November 2024. He started things off by placing the cherries into a sealed big plastic bag for an initial low oxygen cherry ferment. The cherries are later pulped and then the process is repeated with the wet parchment. Once the fermentation is over, Miller washes the parchment, dries it, and then stores it in clean and dry plastic bags until its ready to go off to the mill for milling and export.