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 that 850 in total. This small lot of washed “coccoies” is from the Suchitán “garden”. Little is known about this cultivar except that it is likely a wild Ethiopian landrace collected near the city of Jimma in Ethiopia’s southwest. The stature of the plant is tall, spacious, and yields are extremely low compared to commercial cultivars. The cup flavors of this tiny microlot are very impressive, like the best Ethiopians or new world geshas, and are intensely floral with syrupy sweet stone fruit, bright tomato, strawberry lemonade, and fresh basil. Coffea Diversa 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 from the farm’s small plot of coccoies 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 3 times per day.
