Nicaragua Monte Cristo - Single Origin

Strawberry, milk chocolate and brown sugar, roasted light. It works as filter and as espresso, and naturals like this make excellent cold brew.

Monte Cristo is Victor Robelo's farm, in Peñas Blancas in the Jinotega department, and his family have grown coffee for generations. It sits between 900 and 1,100 metres, lower than you'd expect for a bean this dense. The constant fog and heavy tree shade slow the cherries as they ripen, and slow ripening is what builds density and sweetness. The farm borders the Peñas Blancas Massif reserve, part of Bosawás, one of the largest protected rainforests in Central America.

Cherries are picked by hand in several passes so only ripe fruit goes forward, then dried on shaded raised beds at the Las Nubes mill for 35 to 40 days. Five weeks of slow drying is where the strawberry comes from.

You'll also find this coffee in Blossom, where it does the fruit work alongside a Brazilian Daterra and an Ethiopian Sidamo.

Best if you:

• want to taste how different a natural can be from a washed coffee
• like tropical fruit with a boozy edge
• make cold brew at home

Brew it: espresso nearer 2.3:1, so 18g in for about 41g out. V60, Aeropress or batch brew at 60g per litre. Cafetiere at 70g per litre with water just off the boil. For cold brew, 12:1 water to coffee, about 83g per litre, steeped for 12 to 24 hours.

We roast in 18kg batches through the week, so nothing sits around ageing before it reaches you. When a single origin lot runs out, that's it until the next season. No two coffees are the same, so we let each one dictate how it's roasted. Every batch runs on manual controls, so we can react to how the coffee develops in the drum and fine tune the balance of convection and conduction heat. That's where the precision comes from.