El Monarca is Back!
Oct 29, 2023
El Monarca is back!
We are so excited to have this coffee again as our second purchase from this farm. Our first purchase was in 2020, the lot was very vibrant with tropical notes and some refreshing green vibes due to the cultivar's Robusta Genetics (IH-90).
This year, we definitely see some sort of maturity in the flavors, that is telling us the coffee plants there have grown up and matured well; the cherries were picked at its full ripeness as well. We got the tropical flavors more pronounced and then the Robusta factors are offering some purple/red vibes with notes of cherry and mangosteen, that are quite common in natural process coffees usually.
In our perspective, we feel that, the hybrid cultivars (hybrid of Arabica and Robusta) are still underrated in some ways. In our experience, some hybrid cultivars tastes incredible with unique flavors in a specific terroir for each cultivar. In fact, sometimes hybrid cultivars outperforms some sort of fancy cultivars such as Geisha in COE competition, even wins the first place. It's also true that some of our coffee producing friends say some hybrid cultivars are amazing of a certain terroir as well. For example, Parainema in Honduras and Castillo, Tabi or Variedad Colombia in Colombia taste really nice and you can see those cultivars in Cup of Excellence winning lots. We can definitely see those unique and interesting cultivar/terroir combination from El Monarca with great potential of the 1940masl highland of this farm. It's incredible that this farm used to be a yard for grass land, reclaimed into coffee production area very recently. Technically, it's still under reclaiming using this IH-90 at first then they will try other cultivars.
Actually, we sometimes cup our coffees randomly and blindly; and this coffee was standing out the best at a specific moment(at its peak), even amongst some of our fanciest coffees in the lineup. Those classic washed Central American coffees would always represent our roasting and these cultivars would add some diversity to our offering list, we definitely love those coffee as a coffee roaster.
Highly recommend for those who looking to get some exciting flavors that are different from those of fancy cultivars or experimental process coffees!