Alto Mirador sits at eleven hundred and twenty metres, high enough that ripening runs a fortnight behind everything else we buy. This year the flowering came through a wet spell and the pod set was heavy, which usually means small beans and a thin lot.
The cutting window
It did not go that way. The estate cut over eleven days rather than the usual three weeks, holding back the under-ripe pods entirely rather than mixing them in to make weight. That is a costly decision — they left an estimated four hundred kilograms of wet pod on the trees — and it is the single reason this lot is as clean as it is.
Ferment
Seven days, turned twice daily, boxed within twenty-four hours of cutting. Peak mass temperature hit 49 °C on day four, which is a degree higher than last year and shows up in the cup as a slightly heavier tannin.
Cupping
Jasmine on the nose, green banana in the middle, black tea at the finish. Our panel scored acidity at eight out of ten, the highest we have recorded from this estate. Two tasters out of six found it too sharp at seventy-eight per cent. We kept it at seventy-eight anyway.
Farm-gate
We paid 7.10 dollars per dry kilogram, up from 6.55 last year, agreed before the cutting started. The increase covers the second daily turn and the labour of leaving the under-ripe pods behind.
Roughly nine hundred kilograms landed. At our batch size that is about twenty weeks of bars, and when it is gone the next lot will not taste like this one.