BELLA CARMONA

MILK CHOCOLATE, ORANGE ZEST, HONEY

BELLA CARMONA is a delicious washed process coffee from Guatemala's Antigua Valley. Comforting and complex, this coffee is a great option for the casual coffee drinkers and the coffee nerds alike.

PRODUCER
This coffee is a blend of lots from 18 farms in the Antigua valley managed by Luis Pedro Zelaya (LPZ) and his team at the Bella Vista wet mill. LPZ is a fourth generation coffee farmer and dry miller. Bella Vista services the coffee produced from his family estates and numerous other "legacy" farms he manages through a profit-sharing agreement with the owners of the farms.

Starting around 2000, LPZ began shifting his family's coffee business away from commercial coffee production to focusing solely on specialty coffee and micro-lots. In addition to LPZ's family farms and the "legacy" farms, Bella Vista processes coffee from hundreds of smallholders across the Antigua Valley. 

VARIETIES
This offering consists solely of the B300 variety or "cultivar". Named by coffee geneticists in Costa Rica: "B" for "Bourbon" and "300" for the selection number that was chosen for cultivation. B300 is a 'dwarf' Bourbon variety: it has many of the same flavor characteristics as Bourbon (normally a quite rangy variety) but more compact. 

The Bourbon variety is one of the main two main varieties of the Coffea Arabica species and is known for producing excellent quality. However, Bourbon is becoming more rare due to its lower yield potential and susceptibility to disease. Planting Bourbon is a high risk and high reward venture that many coffee farmers do not feel comfortable taking.

 
PROCESSING PROTOCOL
Once the coffee is received it is inspected and weighted. The coffee is then depulped and fermented overnight in an open tank. The next day the coffee is rinsed clean and spread over a patio to dry in full sun.