Coffee Roast:	Light
Body:	Heavy
Characteristics:	Fruity, Chocolaty

Background Info
We needed to have this coffee. It’s incredibly sweet and clean, has fantastic acidity, is excitingly unique, and offers a story that spans back decades. The coffee came in second at the 2008 Nicaraguan Cup of Excellence, and we paid more for this coffee than any other coffee in the past. It was too good to pass up. And besides, we’re more than happy to pay the farmers such a premium price for a limited quantity experiment that just stuns us.

This washed and sun-dried coffee comes from the farms La Gloria/Limoncillo. Named after the owners, and sisters, Ethel MCEwan and Maria Ligia Mierisch McEwan, the farm places much importance on maximizing and improving quality “through careful harvest selection and wet and dry milling.”

The coffee is a JavaNica varietal, tasting like both an Ethiopian and Java coffee, yet at the same time, tasting like neither. The Matagalpa has the citrus of an Ethiopian, the body of a Java, and the rounded cup profile of a Nicaraguan all the while creating an entirely unique cup.

The only way such a complex, globe-hopping cup is possible is through the fact that the coffee did in fact cross countries, oceans, and continents before settling in Nicaragua. Most recently, it has been in the hands of the McEwan sisters, but prior to its cultivation on their farms, Matagalpa was an experiment, locked in a private research lab grown for years in hidden gardens containing Ethiopian and Indonesian cultivars. In Nicaragua, this coffee was black-ops. The cultivars can be traced back to Ethiopian varietal lines of both the Rambung and Abyssinia, which found themselves in Java in 1928 by the hands of the Dutch. People knew little of this experiment and less knew what it would bear. That is until Nicaragua faced political instability and the operation was shut down. Then, “someone who knew someone” obtained the heirloom longberry seedstock before it was lost forever and placed twenty pounds of the seedstock in the hands of a small group of farmers.

It was a risk planting this coffee without knowing what it would or could produce, but this new, exotic coffee has finally arrived.

Roastmaster comments by R. Miguel Meza:
This coffee is heavy bodied and mild in acidity while being brilliantly clean and sweet. The flavor is softly fruited. A mild citrus and mango flavor that I would call “geisha-light.”