Wilton Benitez Orange Bourbon

Our Wilton Benitez Orange Bourbon is back. There is no shortage of amazing coffees coming from Wilton Benitez but this one quickly became a crowd favorite and for good reason. It’s super creamy with tasting notes of orange creamsicle, fruit stripe gum, ginger blossom, and vanilla with a bubblegum like sweetness. This lot is an Orange Bourbon coffee variety, a natural mutation where the coffee cherries are orange when they ripen rather than the typical red color (and they tend to be even more fruity then their Red Bourbon counterparts). It’s truly a memorable and unique coffee experience from a very talented producer.

Wilton Benitez is at the forefront of innovation in coffee processing and is doing amazing things to create unique and masterful flavors. He is a chemical engineer turned high-end coffee grower and his science background, coupled with decades of experience in coffee growing/tasting, have led to some of the most unique and nuanced coffees we’ve experienced. Processing of this Orange Bourbon lot started with sterilizing selectively harvested ripe coffee cherries with ozonated water and ultraviolet light. The coffee is then immersed in water heated to 90 degrees Celsius to achieve better sterilization and open the fruit’s pores. Microorganisms are added during the first phase of fermentation taking place in anaerobic bioreactors. The skin of the fruit is then removed and a second fermentation phase takes place. The coffee seeds are then subjected to a thermal shock (first a high temperature to swell the beans, allowing the unique flavors and aromas from the initial anaerobic yeast fermentation to penetrate the seeds, then a cold temperature to constrict the beans and lock in those unique flavors and aromas.) The washed coffee is then taken to ecological drying equipment where the coffee is dried 36 hours or until reaching the desired humidity of 11 percent.