Candy Cloud Espresso

We've been buying coffee from Luis Pedro Zelaya since 2010. Sixteen years. That's longer than we've been doing almost anything.

Here's the first thing to know about him. Luis Pedro is a washed coffee guy. Famously. Bella Vista has been in his family for more than a hundred years, he's the fourth generation to run it, and in all that time the place has built its entire reputation on doing the classic thing perfectly – clean, sweet, structured, unmistakably Antigua. While a big chunk of the coffee world spent the last decade chasing whatever process was trending that season, Luis Pedro just quietly kept making some of the cleanest coffee in Guatemala.

So when a natural of his turned up on the cupping table, I sat up.

A bit about the man. He's an agronomist, studied at Zamorano in Honduras, and he runs more than twenty farms around Antigua. Twenty. He will talk your ear off about pruning and regenerative agriculture and honestly you should let him. Every year he cuts back every third row of trees, hard, so at any moment one row is regenerating, one is at peak production, and one is waiting its turn. That's not a trick. That's just farming done properly by somebody who plans in decades.

I've called him my longtime friend and coffee farmer supreme before. I meant both.

Now, this lot. Bourbon, natural processed. Which, if you've been reading along, is the fun part. Naturals live or die on the drying, and drying is the exact thing Luis Pedro has spent this past decade improving, every single year – patios, covered raised beds, mechanical dryers, moisture readings taken constantly and religiously.

What you get is not a wild, boozy, fruit-bomb natural. That was never going to be his move. It's an Antigua Bourbon – all the structure and sweetness you already trust from him – with fruit layered over the top. Restrained. Clean. Really, really good.