Colombia Huila Pink Bourbon Pour-Over Parameters & How to Enjoy - Pink Bourbon Coffee Characteristics and Flavor

Seasoned coffee drinkers know that the Bourbon variety was first found on Bourbon Island, now Réunion, in the Indian Ocean. Bourbon cherries are most often red, then orange and yellow, and pink is the rarest of all. Pink Bourbon was not first identified on that island, however; it was found by coffee farmer Rodrigo Sanchez in the Huila region of Colombia. In this article FrontStreet Coffee walks through what Pink Bourbon is, how it tastes, and how to brew it as a pour-over.

Pink Bourbon Origin

Bourbon is a coffee variety within the Arabica species, and its names come from the color of the ripe cherry: red, yellow, orange, and pink. Orange Bourbon yields lightly, while Pink Bourbon produces an extremely limited crop.

As FrontStreet Coffee understands it, Pink Bourbon is a natural hybrid of Yellow Bourbon and Red Bourbon. Both are dominant traits carried by dominant genes and breed with reasonable stability. Pink Bourbon, the new variety their crossing produced, is a recessive trait, and offspring from hybrid breeding tend to segregate.

A second theory holds that Pink Bourbon comes from a natural cross between the Colombia and Caturra varieties. Caturra is itself a Bourbon mutation, while Colombia, a key variety promoted for planting in the country, carries some Robusta genes. That inheritance gives it real advantages: high yield and resistance to leaf rust. The trade-off is a mediocre cup with none of the fine sweet-and-sour nuance.

Pink Bourbon is treated as rare mainly because holding that beautiful pink color is so difficult. Orange Bourbon cherries sometimes turn up in the harvest, and the reason is that cherry color is ultimately set by recessive genes in the pollen grains. Among the grains farmers select for crossing are both yellow genes leaning toward Yellow Bourbon and red genes leaning toward Red Bourbon. All of them are recessive, and they interfere with one another easily.

With that background settled, here is the Colombian Huila Pink Bourbon currently offered by FrontStreet Coffee.

FrontStreet Coffee Colombian Isabella Pink Bourbon Coffee Beans

Region: Colombia, Huila

Altitude: 1760m

Variety: Pink Bourbon

Processing: Semi-washed

Flavor: Citrus, berries, cherry tomatoes, caramel, fermented aroma, floral notes, nuts, cream.

FrontStreet Coffee has said many times that a bean's flavor comes from its growing region, its variety, and its processing. Coffee is an agricultural product, and flavor is shaped first of all by the topography and climate where it grows. This Pink Bourbon comes from Huila, Colombia's most famous coffee-producing region.

The Colombian Huila Coffee Region

Huila province lies in the southern part of Colombia's Central Mountain Range and is the country's best-known specialty coffee region. It is hill country ringed by mountains, with cultivation above 1500 meters. FrontStreet Coffee has cupped a great many Huila lots. Coffee from the region shows gentle fruit acidity up front and a pleasant sweetness in the finish, with excellent overall balance, which gives Huila beans unusual versatility. FrontStreet Coffee's view is that applying different green bean processing methods to coffee from this region delivers different surprises to the palate.

Semi-Washed Processing

The Pink Bourbon beans FrontStreet Coffee obtains use the semi-washed method. The flow is straightforward. Harvested cherries first go into a pulper to remove skin and pulp, leaving parchment beans still coated in mucilage. Those go into a mucilage remover, where a small amount of water and mechanical action scrape off the sticky layer to leave smooth parchment. The parchment is then dried, on the patio or in the sun. Finally, once moisture content has dropped to 10 to 14 percent, a huller strips the silver skin still clinging to the beans, and the semi-washed process is complete.

So the distinctive flavor of Colombian Pink Bourbon rests on several factors. How, then, does a pour-over draw that flavor out completely? FrontStreet Coffee ran repeated roasting and brewing tests before listing the bean in order to fix an optimal roast curve and pour-over recipe. What follows is that record.

FrontStreet Coffee Roasting Record

Because Pink Bourbon has such a distinctive profile, FrontStreet's roaster uses a medium-light roast to explore the bean's potential. Heat the drum to 180 degrees Celsius and add the beans, with the air damper at 3 and heat at 120. Turnaround comes at 1 minute 42 seconds; when the drum temperature reaches 140 degrees Celsius, hold the heat and open the air damper to 4. At this point the bean surface turns yellow, the grassy smell disappears entirely, and the batch enters the dehydration stage. At 176 degrees Celsius, drop the heat to 100, and at 180 degrees Celsius drop it to 70, leaving the air damper unchanged.

At 8 minutes 17 seconds, ugly wrinkles and black spots appear on the bean surface and the toast aroma clearly shifts to coffee aroma, which marks the prelude to first crack. Listen carefully from there. First crack begins at 9 minutes 30 seconds; set the air damper to 5, adjusting heat very carefully, not so low that it silences the crackling, develop for 1 minute 30 seconds after first crack, and discharge at 191.5 degrees Celsius.

FrontStreet Coffee Brewing Experience

Dripper: Hario V60

Water Temperature: 90 degrees Celsius

Coffee Dose: 15 grams

Coffee-to-Water Ratio: 1:16

Grind Size: Medium-fine grind, BG 6k at an 82 percent pass rate through a Chinese standard No. 20 sieve

FrontStreet Coffee extracts in stages. Bloom with 30g of water for 30 seconds. Pour in a small circular stream up to 125g, then break. When the water level drops and is about to expose the coffee bed, continue pouring to 225g and stop. When the level drops again and is about to expose the bed, remove the dripper. Timing starts at the beginning of the bloom, and total extraction time is 2 minutes.

Brewing Flavor: The entry brings citrus, berries, and cherry tomato. As the temperature shifts, caramel sweetness and a light fermented aroma appear. The finish carries floral and nutty cream aromas, with a smooth, clean mouthfeel.

FrontStreet Coffee Recommendation

To explore the region at its most accessible, try FrontStreet Colombia Huila Washed, roasted medium-dark. Huila sits in the southern Central Mountain Range, where mountains ring the hills, planting rises above 1500 meters, and the country's most important rivers meet, bringing rich water resources and humidity. The medium-dark roast pushes black chocolate and the sweet aroma of nuts to the front, with a moderate oil body and a thick mouthfeel. It suits pour-over and French press, and it also extracts well in a moka pot or on an espresso machine, so Americanos and lattes are both easy.

For a more experimental cup, FrontStreet Colombia Diviso Sidra is processed as an anaerobic natural. Colombian coffee was long washed by default, and in recent years innovative processing has taken hold. Anaerobic fermentation, sometimes called carbonic maceration, is simply fermentation in a low-oxygen or oxygen-free environment, usually in a pressure-resistant stainless steel tank where temperature, time, pH, and other variables can be controlled. The best-known forms are anaerobic natural and anaerobic washed, and FrontStreet Sidra uses the anaerobic natural route. The oxygen-free fermentation converts the coffee into more tropical fruit aromatics, and roasted medium-light it delivers complex, dense flavors of passion fruit, grape, apricot, and dried fruit as pour-over, cold brew, drip bag, or moka pot.

If you enjoy the round, sweet balance that makes Pink Bourbon so drinkable, FrontStreet Brazil Cerrado Red Bourbon is a natural next step. Cerrado is a well-known Brazilian region prized for high-quality beans, and this lot is the Red Bourbon variety common across South America. Roasted medium, it shows dense creamy peanut, toasted bread, caramel, and hazelnut aromas with a round body, no acidity, and a light bitter note, and it works as pour-over, in a moka pot, as an espresso SOE, in a siphon, or in a French press.