Marlon Bolaños - Pink Bourbon Honey

Producer: Marlon Bolaños 
Origin: Acevedo, Huila, Colombia
Elevation: 1670 MASL
Variety: Pink Bourbon
Process: Double Fermentation -> Honey
Roast Level: Light
Importer: Unblended Coffee
Flavor Notes: Guava, Hi-Chew, Huckleberry

We are so so sooo excited to be releasing our second coffee grown by Marlon Bolaños (If you haven't checked out the lot of Aji that we released from him, now is the time as we're running low on that inventory and that coffee is absolutely stunning).  This time around,  we have an exceptional lot of the Pink Bourbon variety that underwent a double fermentation before being honey processed. 

We recently riffed with Marlon via DM about this upcoming release and just how well received his Aji lot was for us recently at The Barista League Event down in Atlanta earlier this month.  Marlon and Justin had a cool back and forth about AeroPress as Marlon has won and placed in a number of AeroPress competitions in Colombia and Justin just brought home the third place championship for the US Nationals.  Funny enough, they discovered they each landed on a nearly identical recipe for competition... and if you don't know much about the AeroPress, you can essentially approach it a good 500 different ways so the fact they each independently landed on something similar to bring home the medals is pretty insane.

ANYWAY! As told by Unblended: Marlon grew up knowing coffee as his family’s livelihood, but it wasn’t until a barismo course at 17 that he began to see its deeper potential. What started as curiosity became commitment: planting differentiated varieties, refining fermentation through trial and error, and building Three Coffee Farmers alongside his two brothers. From the spring water filtered through rock on his farm — now known among competitors as “champions’ water” — to his dream of producing a winning auction lot, Marlon represents a new generation of producers shaping their future with intention, patience, and vision.    

Marlon’s primary focus on the farm is to develop innovative coffee products that are not only high quality but also scalable, allowing more producers and roasters to benefit from them. With this Pink Bourbon Honey, his goal was to enhance the natural sweetness and fruity complexity of the coffee, creating a cup that is both approachable and distinctive.

The processing begins with a two-day fermentation, carefully monitored to bring out the coffee’s bright fruit notes without overwhelming its balance. After fermentation, the coffee is depulped and stored in closed tanks for an additional two days, allowing the sugars and flavors to fully develop. The result is a coffee with an extraordinary sweetness. The lingering aftertaste is smooth yet layered, offering a complex and memorable cup.

Marlon picks the Pink Bourbon cherries at peak ripeness and sorted by density.  They are then added to plastic and closed (a la anaerobic natural treatment) tanks and fermented for two days before being depulped and re introduced to the tanks and anaerobically fermented without water for another two days. From there, the coffee is laid out to dry with some mucilage intact for 10-15 days then placed in a mechanical dryer until the seeds reach a 11% moisture. 

This is the first time we've come across this variety processed this way and huge props to Marlon for figuring out all the details of this fermentation approach.  This cup screams with a candy-like sweetness and pink fruits galore.  We get notes of ripe guava, a Hi-Chew sweetness and florals a la honeysuckle for daysssss.  This coffee absolutely slaps and is one of our favorite expressions of Pink Bourbon in some time.  Marlon Bolaños for the win!