Intelligentsia Coffee has just released the second entry in their Exotic Coffee Collection series, this time offering a Geisha and a Typica variety from Bolivia’s Café Takesi, a small 38 hectare farm that claims to be the world’s highest coffee farm, at an elevation of 1,900 to 2,500 meters above sea level. We were lucky enough to snag an advance look at this Takesi release, outfitted in stunning packaging by Intelligentsia and Rohner Letterpress. The photos you see in this article were taken at our secret Portland forest compound, where we brewed the Takesi coffees on the new SprudgeLabs custom pink powder-coat Technivorm Moccamaster.
This distinctive tin package contains two 50g bags of the Typica, which Intelligentsia has offered before, and one 50g bag of the Geisha (or Gesha) variety. This limited release represents the very first time a nanolot of this variety from Takesi (less than one green coffee bag total was produced) has come to market. Only 100 units of this Takesi offering will be made available to the public.
Takesi is known for the effects its extreme elevation has on coffee production, with the trees on the farm taking a year or more longer to germinate, bear fruit, and recover from pruning than at lower elevation farms. It is thought that this longer, slower process leads to more delicate, deeply nuanced coffees.
Takesi’s Typica variety, coming from the highest part of the farm, took first place in the 2009 Cup Of Excellence, which was the last time the juried competition took place in Bolivia. In the years since we’ve seen Takesi served by Intelligentsia competitors at United States Barista Championship national and regional events across the country.
These lots of coffee were offered for tasting at special producer event on March 10 at Intelligentsia’s Broadway coffeebar, which featured producers Mariana Iturralde Costa and Juvenal Quijhua Ari from Café Takesi. You can order the coffees for yourself from Intelligenstia’s webstore, but again, act quickly, because this $60 special edition offering is limited to just 100 tins.
The brewing process was supervised under the careful watch of Cherokee Bat, Sprudge.com’s in-house coffee consultant cat.
