SLEEPER Jhoan Vergara Colombia

Jhoan Vergara's family came to Huila from Cundinamarca in the early '90s, following an uncle who'd already found success in the region. Coffee farming wasn't new to them as Jhoan's grandparents had grown it up north, but Huila was. They started small: 15 hectares total, only 2 of them were set aside for coffee production. That grew over time to about 90,000 trees, almost all caturra.

For the first fifteen years or so, the family sold into local and commodity markets as specialty coffee barely existed yet as a segment of the industry. That started to change in the early 2000s, when Jhoan's mother entered a coffee into the Cup of Excellence. She didn't win. But the family started paying closer attention to quality, and so did Jhoan.

At fifteen, he left high school in Pitalito to work the farm full time, and got curious about where the coffee actually went, and who was buying it. That curiosity took him to SENA (the Servicio Nacional de Aprendizaje, Colombia's national training service, where a lot of producers learn agronomy, cupping, roasting, and basic brewing). It's also where he met Nestor Lasso. His friendship with Nestor turned into one of the more important partnerships behind the high end specialty market in Huila. Then came 2008, and roya (coffee leaf rust) hit the Vergara farm hard. They renovated with varieties bred to resist it, yield more, and still cup well: tabi first, then pink bourbon, gesha, caturra, chiroso, maracaturra, red bourbon.

Jhoan's been experimenting with processing for years now, mostly chasing one thing: consistency, and the ability to intentionally reproduce a cup profile he likes on purpose instead of by accident. These days that means working with a microbiology lab in Pitalito, which isolates the microorganisms specific to each coffee variety and reproduces them in bulk. Jhoan reintroduces those organisms, as cherry or already depulped, back into the coffee mass, where they get to work without competition from the other organisms that happen to be floating around in the area.

Jhoan's been experimenting with processing for years now, mostly chasing one thing: consistency, and the ability to reproduce a cup profile he likes on purpose instead of by accident. These days that means working with a microbiology lab in Pitalito, which isolates the microorganisms specific to each coffee variety and reproduces them in bulk. Jhoan reintroduces those organisms, as cherry or already depulped, back into the coffee mass, where they get to work without competition from whatever else happens to be floating around.

He says the floral character in his pink bourbon comes down to three things happening in sequence: an oxidation (he calls it a controlled "rot") of the whole cherry, a fermentation with the reintroduced microorganisms in a low-oxygen environment, and a hot water wash at the end, a thermal shock that keeps yeasts and bacteria working right up until the coffee starts to dry.

Jhoan is one of the more influential producers in the region, and something of a pioneer of the thermal shock technique. This coffee is intensely flavorful, crisp like fruit punch, and clean underneath all that intensity.