A black honey mosto IPA Gesha from Edwin Noreña's Campo Hermoso in Quindío, roasted by Cozy Monster and poured at Story Coffee, their own Bellevue café. Red florals, peach, passion fruit, and the biggest aroma I have run into this year.
In the cup
The aroma is the part I keep thinking about. The barista let me smell the whole beans before I ordered and then again right after grinding, and the second one was on another level: red florals and ripe peach coming off the grounds hard enough that I was still chasing them when the cup landed. Passion fruit and a bright lemon-tea character followed in the drink. What surprised me was how clean it stayed. A coffee fermented this deliberately can collapse into one loud boozy note, and this one kept its edges. I logged it five stars.
The coffee
Gesha IPA comes from Campo Hermoso in Circasia, a town in Colombia’s Quindío department, and the producer is Edwin Noreña. He is an agro-industrial engineer with graduate work in biotechnology, a Q Grader and Q Processor, and a Cup of Excellence judge, and he processes cherry bought from other growers alongside his own. Cozy Monster’s label reads 6,070 feet, about 1,850 meters, puts the roast slider near the light end, and lists the coffee at 88 points. Nobody is named against that number, so read it as the roaster’s own. It sold in 200 g bags for $23 and was gone when I went looking.
The variety is listed as Gesha. World Coffee Research rates Gesha’s quality potential at high altitude as exceptional and describes delicate floral, jasmine, and peach-like aromas, while also pointing out that several genetically distinct plants get sold under the name. Here it is the producer’s and roaster’s identification.
Black honey and mossto
Honey processing means the skin comes off the cherry and the sticky mucilage stays on the seed while it dries. No honey is involved; the name is about the texture. Black sits at the darkest end of that range, the most mucilage and the slowest, most shaded drying. The color tiers have no industry definition behind them, and what black honey means shifts from country to country and farm to farm.
Mossto is the liquid that fermenting cherry gives off, thick with sugars, yeasts, and bacteria. Noreña coined the word, after the grape must in winemaking, and reuses the liquid to seed a later fermentation. Food science calls that backslopping; the everyday version is a sourdough starter. The IPA is beer-inspired, and hops are part of Noreña’s documented toolkit, but Cozy Monster publishes only “IPA-style mosto fermentation” for this lot, so that is as far as I will take it.
Where I had it
Story Coffee is Cozy Monster’s own bar in downtown Bellevue, where the coffee goes by Black Honey Fruity Geisha. That relationship explains the board: nine pour-overs at 260 mL, seven of them Gesha, running $10 to $25. Mine was $15 and sat mid-lineup, under three of the Panamanians. Keeping that many Geshas on at once only works when the roaster is the one stocking the bar.
I did not catch the barista’s name. He was friendly, knew the whole lineup, and told me you can ask to smell the beans before ordering, which is how the grinder moment happened at all. This was my second visit and both have delivered.
Both Story Coffee and Cozy Monster are on our Favorites page, alongside the other roasters, beans, and shops I keep coming back to.