Exhumation Rites

Suitable for all brewing methods.

The Yungas is where the Andes break into jungle. East of La Paz the mountains fall away into steep, fog-bound valleys, the roads cut narrow into the rock, and coffee here is grown on the same frontier where the state has long fought to turn farmers off the coca leaf and onto something they can sell whole. In Sud Yungas, Jhonny Corina works Finca La Asunta at 1,500 metres, a small holding wrung from difficult, near-vertical ground.

The tree is Java, and it is a stranger to this continent. An Ethiopian landrace carried first to the island that named it, then to Cameroon, and reaching South America only in the final years of the last century, it is a wanderer that found its way to the Bolivian hills against long odds. Tall, slow to bear and thin in yield, it is planted by few and brought to the cup by fewer still. Out of an origin most roasters will never touch, raised by a single grower on a single farm, it is a coffee that arrives like something recovered from ground that was meant to keep it.

Corina renders it in the traditional washed method. Ripe cherry is depulped, fermented under careful watch, then washed clean to the parchment and dried slow until the clarity sets and holds. The washed road grants no cover. It cuts the coffee to the bone and lets the bloodline speak unaccompanied.