Story
Brew Recipe:
FILTER – MK Dripper
12g Coffee : 180g Water 200°F
548microns
5O
0:00 - Bloom to 40g
0:30 - Spiral pour to 80g
1:00 - Spiral pour to 180g
~3:30 drain
Jamison Savage is a name that has loomed large within the competition world for years. Multiple champions have used his coffees within barista and brewing competitions. It was to Jamison’s Savage line we turned to when it came time for Morgan Eckroth to choose a competition coffee for the 2023 National season. We honed in on this natural processed Gesha offered up, called Parabolic within the Savage line. This is an extended-fermentation carbonic maceration, with an extended drying time of up to 25 days. Both the extended fermentation and drying times lend a heavy fruit character to the coffee, balancing the sometimes delicate and subtle notes of the Gesha variety. Utilizing this coffee, Morgan went on to take second place in the USBC.
Read more about the Savage coffee line below.
SAVAGE COFFEE
We are a collaboration of boutique coffee producers located in Boquete Valley and Volcan, Panama, working together to bring you some of the finest coffees in the world, directly to your door. Our expertise is derived from generations of producers who maintain best practice techniques and a strict attention to detail from agronomy to processing. Through years of experimentation and development we have produced coffees that have participated in most national and world championships, frequently placing in the top 10.
The Panamanian coffee industry is centered in the Chiriquí province of Panama’s northern highlands and is concentrated in the areas of Boquete and Volcán. Also called the Valley of Flowers and Eternal Spring, these areas are perched on the sides of the Baru Volcano and surrounding foothills. It is in these idyllic locales that truly distinct and unique coffees are produced. These highlands are blessed with terroir consisting of highly volcanic, enriched soil, abundant moisture, diverse microclimates, regular rainfall, dense vegetation, and cloud cover to nourish the coffee trees. This in turn contributes to the production of fine shade grown coffees with incredibly complex flavor characteristics.
NATURALLY PROCESSED COFFEE
Natural coffees are beautiful… Okay, natural coffees are beautiful when done properly, but can be equally terrible when things go wrong. Natural processing, or dry processing, refers to the act of drying and fermenting coffee inside the cherry. Long before the age of portafilter tattoos and dual-boiler home espresso machines, coffee was picked and dried this way out of convenience. It is, to this day, still the most convenient and economically friendly way to process coffee cherries. (It’s estimated that dry-processing can use up to 90% less water than the washing process.) So why isn’t all coffee processed this way? Well, as coffee made its way across the world, it was commoditized and standardized, just like all other products spread by colonialism, but that’s a whole other story... Adding to the boom of washed processing, the natural process method can be tricky to get right, due to the delicate nature of fermentation and drying. What does all this have to do with the final cup? Well, when you leave the skin and fruit of the coffee cherry on the seed throughout fermentation and drying, that fruit begins to break down, imparting esters that influence delicate florals and big fruit notes into the seed that survive the roasting process. If it’s rushed or handled incorrectly, this fruit rot can lend off-flavors to the coffee, making the final cup dirty or ‘fermenty.’ Basically that single cherry begins to slowly decay, and controlling that delicate action through advanced technique and metrics allow us, lucky folks, to drink wonderfully floral and fruity coffees. We have long promoted natural processed coffees, and this natural Gesha from Juan Pena is just one of the reasons we do.