Today we are pleased to be releasing this F1 Natural from Tirra Estate in Costa Rica, the first of a series of exciting limited edition (100 x 200g bags ) coffees on my road to the World Roasting Championships. In wanting to bring you something unique to your coffee table, each of the releases will aim to capture an innovative aspect of our industry which has been driven through sustainability.

We have chosen the T-Rex (designed by @kill_beef ) for this particular release as we think it represents this F1 Hybrid Natural Costa Rica well. The coffee is big and chewy, yet elegant and complex, with tropical notes of pineapple and mango, cooling into a rich madagascan chocolate.

As you may or may not know, coffee producers face many hurdles and challenges, including issues with crops being wiped out due to leaf rust disease, alongside issues with low yields. As coffee is often a producers bread and butter, research institutes have been trying to find solutions for these problems, without compromising cup quality. 

Thats where this special cup of coffee comes into the picture: it is an F1 Centroamericano ‘hybrid’, which is a cross between two genetically distant varieties; leaf rust resistant ‘T5296’ and the well known and extremely tasty Ethiopian landrace variety ‘Rume Sudan’. The result: a high yielding, rust resistant coffee that produces an incredibly delicious, high scoring, and complex brew.

The F1 stands for ‘first generation’, marking that this is a first generation of it’s propagation, and it will take 5 more generations of breeding (roughly 15 years) before it will become stable. This means that the flavour experience is unique with every next generation, and so you will never have this particular experience from this specific plant again! Only a small amount of these F1 hybrid varieties have become available to farmers, predominantly within the last 15 years, with Tirra Estate being one of the leaders to bring it to you, the consumer. 

Tirra Estate has dried this coffee in cherry for 23 to 25 days, before hulling and resting for 90 days on parchment. I have then profiled this coffee as part of my training toward the World Championships, aiming to balance and showcase the qualities of this unique variety with the overt sweetness we desire in the cup. 

To grab yourself a bag of this coffee, please go to Sense It London web shop.

Continue to watch this space for more soon…