Notes: Almond Butter, Brown Sugar, Cherry Blossom, Lemon Zest, Pink lemonade and Milk chocolate
Bourbon sidra, to many simply “sidra”, is a kind of dream cultivar. It’s known to be deliciously lush and fruity in the cup. Nobody reliably knows how it was created or how it ended up spreading, but it’s widely believed to have been developed by Nestlé on their research farm in northern Ecuador by manually crossing red bourbon and typica varieties. The goal was to create a purely high-quality cultivar with the best characteristics of each progenitor. Word has it the resulting seedlings were shared for free among regional farmers in exchange for their feedback. Whether that’s true, or the coffee was stolen (as others think), over the next few decades the cultivar became a kind of signature plant of northern Ecuador and is now synonymous with the country (along with typica “mejorado”). In Colombia however, the sidra cultivar is still really scarce, save for among a few farmers, most of whom have traveled to Ecuador expressly to source it.
