Colombia Gesha Natural Microlot

In the Cup: Cooked blueberry, dark chocolate, cooked cranberry, and floral flavors with sugary sweetness and boozy acidity.

Lot: Microlot

Process: Natural

Farm: Finca Yarumal

Variety: Gesha

Elevation: 1430 MASL

Country: Colombia

Harvest: Main Crop: October–December / Fly Crop: June–August

Omar Cardenas Benavides has been growing coffee since he was seven years old, when his father handed him a piece of land and helped him plant his first 300 trees. That plot became an 11-hectare farm in Acevedo, Huila — nearly 30,000 trees rooted in clay loam and volcanic soil, on terrain steep enough to make you stop and look. This Gesha is a microlot: a single standout variety, separated out on its own and kept fully traceable back to Omar's hands. Coffee paid for his children's education. It made him a Best Cup finalist. And when you ask him how he got here, he starts by thanking the agronomists who helped him improve his quality.

Gesha is the variety everyone chases for its floral top notes, and natural processing pushes it somewhere else entirely. Instead of stripping the fruit off before drying, the whole cherry goes into Omar's parabolic dryers, where it can sit as long as eighteen days depending on the weather — the sugars in that fruit slowly working their way into the bean. That's where the cooked blueberry and cranberry come from, and why the sweetness lands closer to syrup than sugar, with a boozy edge to the acidity that only comes from fruit left on the bean a long time. Colombia's humidity makes this a genuinely difficult thing to pull off. Underneath it all, Gesha's floral character is still right there, sitting on a base of dark chocolate. This is exactly what a microlot is for — one farm, one variety, one small separated pick, so none of what makes it special gets blended away.