COLOMBIA PITAYA

Recommended Retail Price: £13/250g

Tasting Notes: Bright and fruity, this Pink Bourbon is a perfectly sweet summer espresso. Expect flavours of easy-peeler orange, raspberry, white peach and macadamia, with an earl-grey like finish.

Region: Palestina, Huila
Altitude: 1400-1700 masl
Variety: Pink Bourbon
Processing: Washed

UK Arrival: June 2026

While looking for a coffee to be our main espresso for summer this delicious Pink Bourbon really stood out to us when cupping. Balanced acidity but with just enough brightness to help the natural sweetness shine; and a pink floral quality characteristic of its cultivar. Secondly this coffee comes to us through Minga, an importer we’ve grown a close relation with. Laura has even visited us here in North Berwick. She also works closely with local small holder farmers in Palestina, Huila. This coffee was created through carefully selecting and blending local lots with similar flavour profiles as opposed to the typical methods of combining lots from the same day or general quality. This coffee was made from lots that specifically reminded Laura and her team of dragonfruit. Earning it the name ‘Pitaya’, the Spanish word for dragonfruit.

Minga

This coffee was sourced and imported through Minga Coffee, a Colombia-based importer co-owned by Laura Meunier and William Ortiz Bermeo. 

We first met Laura when she worked at another importing company, Ensambles. At the time of meeting we had mainly only worked with much bigger importers. The one thing that struck us was how personable it felt. Laura came into the roastery to cup some coffees and chat with us, and she spoke all about the time she’d spent at origin, mentioning the cupping labs that they’d set up in remote areas of the region to provide access to specialty coffee for Mexican smallholders. 

Now Laura has her own importing company, Minga, and working with her continues to feel just as personable. Moreover, we’ve found that we share a lot of similar values across the board. Minga’s website says, “Our goal is to restore a thriving ecosystem where coffee can grow without agrochemicals…. We are working to rebuild biodiversity and cultivate coffee in harmony with nature”. Along with this, they’ve adopted a mantra of “back to washed”, looking more at the quality of different varieties and the potential within traditional processing methods. It’s more about appreciating different coffee varieties and the clean, bright acidity naturally present and highlighted by the washed processing method. Shifting the focus to good varieties and healthy soil will make coffee both delicious and sustainable in the long run.

Minga was the first importer we featured on our Importer Series back in November 2025. Laura was kind enough to answer some questions for us and provide more insight into what challenges a small importer faces and what she has experienced running her own farm. Follow this link to read more!

Since this interview we had the opportunity to talk with Laura and William through a video call, connecting North Berwick and Palestina to learn more about what sustainability means on opposite ends of the supply chain. We had an amazing and insightful chat about what practices they follow on their own farm, El Micelio, such as their commitment to organic agriculture, intercropping and permaculture. More than half of their 7 hectare farm is made up of native forests and they are currently working to spread the native microorganisms from the forest over to their terraced farmland to bolster the soil with nutrients, organic matter and humus. This has already brought in a range of wildlife to the farm, such as worms, beetles and spiders! Which is a great sign that the soil is healthy and full of nutrients. The coffee trees that they have planted are loving this soil and are already producing amazing coffee. We are very much looking forward to tasting future harvests from El Micelio.

Pink Bourbon

Since Pink Bourbon's appearance in 2014 in the village of San Adolfo, municipality of Acevedo, Huila, this variety has managed to captivate a large number of producers in southern Huila due to its resistance to rust, high productivity and cup quality. Many producers in the municipalities of South Huila adopted this varietal as a substitute for the caturra that became too susceptible to rust, and as a better alternative to castillo or colombia in terms of flavour complexity. The large amount of Pink Bourbon that abounds in the area ensures a well-defined, structured and replicable profile in volume. One reason Pink Bourbon tends to be more expensive is its lower yield from parchment to exportable green. The parchment is denser than in most Arabica varieties, and the variety also tends to produce a higher percentage of peaberries, many of which fall outside the standard screen sizes used in specialty coffee. This means that even if the total harvest volume is high, a smaller proportion qualifies as exportable specialty-grade, ultimately raising the cost per pound.

We also highlighted this interesting varietal in a blog post back in 2024, so if you fancy doing a deep dive into its origins follow the link here!

Palestina, Huila, Colombia 

Huila is part of the Colombia Massif, a UNESCO Biosphere reserve covering 4 departments of Southwest Colombia where the Andes separate into two mountain ranges (central and eastern) and where 5 of Colombia’s main rivers are born. This reserve is a strategic area for Colombia, holding more than 70% of the country’s freshwater and an impressive source of biodiversity. Soils in the Massif are extremely rich and fertile for agriculture. What this location means for coffee is that the ecosystem in which coffee grows between 1200 and 2000 masl is conducive to the development of complexity in the fruit. As described in the Appellation of Origin “Cafe de Huila”: the limited sunlight in the region, averaging 1,260 hours per year – about 3.5 hours per day – creates a natural shade that encourages the accumulation of chemical precursors (lipid content and chlorogenic acids) which positively contribute to the coffee's flavor profile. Huila is now the highest coffee producing region in Colombia, making up 18% of total coffee exports. The Huila department is widely recognized both in Colombia and internationally as the country’s largest coffee region by volume, while also being known for cultivating a significant amount of specialty-grade coffee, typically grown on small farms averaging 3-4 hectares.