La Cabra Terrazas del Pisque Bourbon
From the roaster...
Arnaud Causse, a Frenchman and ex-Agricultural Engineer, has two farms in the Pinchincha region of Ecuador. His first, Las Tolas, was planted in the middle of a natural forest. This sounds like an ideal and biodiverse environment for coffee production, but as Arnaud’s coffee trees are an ‘intruder’ in an already balanced ecosystem, other plant species are easily able to out-compete coffee for nutrients, light or space. While the coffees from Las Tolas are delicious, this leads to a constant battle to keep the trees alive, and was something Arnaud wanted to avoid on his next farm, Terrazas del Pisque. Named for the nearby Pisque river, the farm is a distillation of Arnaud’s years of experience as an Agricultural Engineer; a balanced micro-ecosystem built from scratch with coffee at its centre. Several species of native trees were planted, such as Papaya, Avocado and Eucalyptus, in order to provide shade for the coffee, and add to the synergistic system. There are also bee-hives across the plantation, in order to help with pollination, the fruit trees attract birds to fight off fruit flies, and there are also patches of legumes in order to fix nitrogen into the soils. All of this allows Arnaud to grow coffee with zero pesticides, and very natural treatments for soil enrichment. For now, due to the arid climate in the region and very high altitude, reaching over 2100 masl at some parts of the farm, only 15 hectares of the 40 are planted with coffee. There are mainly traditional varietals like Caturra, but also some plots of varietals such as Java and Pacamara. It’s an example of the former that we have purchased this year with the help of our partners at Belco, a round and sweet washed Bourbon. We’re finding a deep sweetness and a juicy acidity, with some interesting floral aromas.