Intelligentsia’s Beautifully Rare Café Inmaculada
This Friday, you have a unique opportunity from Intelligentsia to order a selection of three rare coffees they’re offering from Colombia. The project, called Café Inmaculada (immaculate coffee), is a collaboration between coffee producers Camilo Merizalde and his childhood friends Andres and Julian Holguin. Camilo himself has been experimenting with coffee cultivars for over a decade at Finca Santuario, his farm outside Popayán, which Intelligentsia has exclusively offered since 2006.
This newest project, Café Inmaculada, began in 2011 on a plot of land owned by the Holguins with the goal to “produce the most extraordinary coffees possible, regardless of risks or costs.” Five exotic, but low-yielding cultivars were planted on an 8 hectre parcel of land with ideal growing conditions in Pichinde, west of Cali, Colombia and are now ready for you to enjoy. Intelligentsia has selected three of the five cultivars to offer in a very limited and very beautiful package called the Café Inmaculada Collection ($50) to be roasted this Friday only—February 7th.
The limited edition box set includes a 50 gram bag of three cultivars: Sudan Rume, Laurina and Maragesha—a wild crossbreed of Maragogype and the famed Geisha variety of coffee. Each of the cultivars has its own unique stories and characteristics as told by Intelligentsia below:
Sudan Rume: A legendary coffee variety that originated on the Boma Plateau, located in southeastern Sudan near to the Ethiopian border. This area belongs to a region considered to be the birthplace of the Arabica species. Sudan Rume has long been used by plant breeders as a source of ‘quality’ genes, but is rarely planted because it doesn’t produce large yields.
Laurina: This cultivar, a.k.a. Bourbon Pointu, comes from Réunion Island just off the coast of Madagascar. It is the direct descendent of the trees responsible for seeding most of Latin America, and was all but forgotten for most of the 20th century. Laurina is thought to be an early mutation from the Typica variety and is now considered the ‘original’ Bourbon. It has the distinction of being extremely low in caffeine.
Maragesha: This is a spontaneous wild cross of Maragogype and Geisha that occurred in the Santuario farm outside of Popayán, where trees of the two varieties were growing next to one another. It does not exist anywhere else, and this lot is the first to have ever been harvested.
The packaging itself is just as immaculate as the coffee claims to be, with its delicate geometric details printed by Chicago’s Rohner Letterpress and a metal box for stylishly storing future coffees or your overflowing collection of filters and accessories. Intelligentsia’s designer Andy Wickstrom said of the package design:
The geometric patterning was a nod to Camilo and the Holguins regarding the specificity of their plots—the sub-dividing of a special farm and its fruits. The design was meant to reflect that hyper-specific parcelling of land. The concept of the farm is pretty futuristic, so I felt a minimalist pattern structure fit pretty well.
Having this piece printed by Chicago’s letterpress icon, Rohner Letterpress, added a really nice touch, too. I don’t think it would have worked as well printed any other way, to be honest. The tactile quality it gives print is still cherished by a lot of people. It gives these types of projects the presence that not many other printing processes can. –Andy Wickstrom
There’s a lot of beautiful things going on inside and outside of this box gong all the way back the experimentation on the farm itself. So be sure to get your order in by Friday to have one of these unique coffee sets shipped, or pick one up at one of Intelligentsia’s cafés. There will also be tastings of these coffees held every Friday for the next three weeks at the Intelligentsia store on Broadway in Chicago and in Venice, California.
More about Café Inmaculada at Intelligentsia
