La Leona | Colombia

TL;DR: another stellar coffee from La Leona. This pink bourbon has all the usual hallmarks - clean, sweet, and incredibly expressive, and will be a constant source of your tongue doing a little happy dance in your mouth.

 

Luz Helena grew up in Armenia and has been producing coffee for the last 20 years. She owns a couple of farms in the area, and is also the mother of the two lovely gents who started Cofinet, who supplied us with this great coffee. We’ve had the pleasure of showcasing coffee from La Leona before, and from the Cofinet family farms quite a few times, and this is yet another example of producers who are at the absolute top of their game!

 

 

Luz’s passion for coffee was inspired by her husband’s work on coffee farms and as a dry mill manager. Luz would hear Jairo talking about coffee and wanted to be more involved in the industry. With the support of Jairo, Luz started learning how to care for coffee plants and what steps she needed to take to produce high-quality, ripe cherries. Luz found dealing with insects very challenging at the start and would draw on Jairo’s knowledge to help with this.

 

For several years now, her focus has been on producing Specialty Coffee. With the support of Cofinet, Luz has been able to improve farm practices and focus on producing the best cherries she can. Once ripe, the cherries are then processed by Cofinet at our processing station, La Pradera.

 

When Luz is not tenting to her coffee trees, she enjoys spending time with her friends and being part of local support groups for vulnerable people.

We've kept things clean here, roasting to our usual level of development, making this coffee nice and easy to brew, but bringing our roast colour down just a touch to maintain more acidity to pair up with all the fruity, creamy goodness this coffee has to offer.

We prefer our filter brews from a v60, but we won’t judge for use of anything at all to make yourself a coffee - even a (clean) sock.

 

Our recommended ratio when brewing filter coffee is 60g of coffee per litre of water. Simply scale this down, or up, for your desired size of brew.

 

With all methods, you’ll want: a grind size similar to granulated sugar, boiling water, and about 3 minutes of brewing time. This goes for v60, aeropress, plunger, and the (still hopefully clean) sock.

 

Our favourite recipe for v60:

• 20g of medium to coarsely ground coffee, it’ll feel a little like granulated sugar.
• Set your kettle to boil, and ready your socks to be rocked.
• We use a 60g bloom, with a swirl of the slurry to make sure it’s all wet. You can stir of that’s easier, just don’t rip the paper!
• After that, when your timer is at 45 seconds, add more water to a total of 200g, and swirl gently.
• Then finally at 1:15 on your timer, add the rest of your water, to 330g, and do one last little swirl.
• Wait till it drains through, roughly 3:30 is a good time, pour into your favourite mug, and let those socks be rocked.

 

If you’d like more info or tips, get in touch! hello@coreroasters.cc