Source Analysis by Charlie Habegger
In 2011 friends José Padilla and Gonzalo Hernández gathered coffee seeds from their first project, a varietal coffee estate, or “garden” as they called it, in Costa Rica. They brought the seeds to a new location, in Suchitán, Guatemala, to establish a second estate modeled after the first. Combined, these two coffee “gardens”, both known as Coffea Diversa, now make up the largest private collection of coffee botanical variants in the world—more than 850 in total.
This small lot of washed bourbon pointu is from the Suchitán “garden”. “Pointu”, so called for the seed’s pointy tips, is also frequently known as “Laurina” or “Leroy” and is originally traced back to a spontaneous bourbon phenotype that appeared on Reunion Island in the early 19th century. There are small amounts of seed stock still in circulation, typically on varietal estates like Coffea Diversa. The cup flavors are light and tea-like, with lemon verbena and peach, pastry, toasted coconut and a bit of dark chocolate. It’s mellow, subtle, and a fascinating specimen from a very ambitious project.
José and Gonzalo insist their estates are not coffee farms but gardens: “like in a conventional flower garden in which you find many types of plants producing many different types of flowers, in the Coffea Diversa Garden you will find many different types of rare coffee botanical variants.” They have a clear, and not incorrect, vision for the value of arabica diversity. Most of the world’s coffee has almost no genetic variation; differences in taste are largely generated by terroir. Coffea Diversa follows the opposite approach, introducing a huge range of genetics to single, preselected terroirs, allowing genetic differences to assert themselves in the cup. Part of the motivation is modeling durability: an ideal coffee farm will have genetic diversity in its coffee, at a minimum to make it more resilient against pests and diseases, but also to keep it competitive and prolific.
During harvest, fresh picked cherry is collected and depulped the following day. Depulping is done using a Penagos machine, which depulps and pressure washes the sticky mucilage from the coffee seed to a predetermined degree. Once depulped the parchment is fermented for 48 hours and then washed clean. Drying takes place on raised and lightly shaded screen beds and typically lasts 12-15 days, during which it is rotated three times per day.
This botanical selection is a rarity. It is a genetic mutation of Bourbon that results in dwarfism, pointed leaves, berries, and seeds, and is naturally lower than standard arabica in caffeine. We sent this batch to a lab for HPLC-DAD (High-performance liquid chromatography with diode-array detection) and compared it with a standard arabica (washed Catuai) and a decaffeinated arabica coffee (Mountain Water Process). This selection measured 0.7276% caffeine by weight, compared to 1.065% for standard arabica. There was no detectable caffeine in the decaf sample.
Bourbon Pointu, or Laurina, or Leroy, has a history interesting not only for its depth but for how well documented it is. The period of time that arabica coffee spent being cultivated on Reunion Island isn’t often discussed in cultivar histories, mainly because most of Bourbon’s diversification occurred after it reached the Americas, or traveled back to East Africa. The Pointu mutation occurred on Reunion Island, however, making it one of the oldest traceable bourbon genetics available today. As usual, our Director of Education at the Crown, Chris Kornman, has researched this extensively and made the story not only easy to find, but enjoyable to read: https://royalcoffee.com/bourbons-botanical-origins-and-the-evolution-of-laurina/?srsltid=AfmBOoqLPCJLtwXs-fmAc9aY2EoGok8M-RwjDMlUFlBU5CTwAUTSnTLT
