A blueberry co-fermented washed Purple Caturra from Finca Monteblanco in Huila, Colombia, roasted by Hydrangea. Intense fermented blueberry, brewed at 1:16 on the V60.
In the cup
The fermented blueberry aroma hits the moment you open the bag, before any water touches the grounds, and it carries at full volume into the cup. Blueberry and raspberry lead, with a milk chocolate sweetness underneath that keeps the fruit from turning sharp. I logged it 4.5 stars and brewed it every morning for a week. My wife took one smell and passed. That split is the honest review: if you gravitate toward clean, delicate washed coffees, the fermentation here will probably read as too much, and if you enjoy loud co-ferments, this is one of the most committed examples I’ve had. It was still going strong at 48 days off a May 24 roast, which fits how heavily processed light roasts hold up over a long rest.
The coffee
Mora azul is Mexican Spanish for blueberry, and the name describes both the process and the plant. The lot comes from Rodrigo Sánchez Valencia, a third-generation producer at Finca Monteblanco above Pitalito in Huila, Colombia, at 1,730 meters. The farm turns out competition microlots each harvest, and Sánchez is also the producer who identified Pink Bourbon growing among his trees. The variety here, Purple Caturra, is his find too: a purple-ripening selection he spotted among Caturra his grandfather planted in the 1980s. It has no entry in World Coffee Research’s variety catalog yet, so treat the name as a farm selection rather than a documented cultivar. Hydrangea’s own process notes add that the fermentation tanks held both Caturra and Bourbon cherries.
This is my second Hydrangea feature in a row. The Berkeley roaster specializes in light, fruit-forward, process-focused lots, and this bag arrived in the same order as the Salma Bermudez I wrote up two weeks ago.
How it’s processed
The blueberry in the cup is engineered, and Hydrangea is up front about how. The process starts with a mother culture built from Purple Caturra cherries fermented for 190 hours with sugar, molasses, and concentrated blueberry juice. After pulping, the cherries spend another 150 hours in sealed tanks with that cultured infusion, then dry for 2–3 days in direct sun followed by 15–18 days under shade canopies. That is a long, controlled co-fermentation by any standard, and it explains why the blueberry reads this loudly: the fruit character is put into the seed during processing, with the variety and terroir filling in around it.
How I brewed it
Every brew was a V60: 16 g of coffee to 256 g of water (1:16), 96 °C, grind 6.8 on the Fellow Ode Gen 2, finishing at 2:36 with a 1:00 drawdown. The recipe needed no babying. The blueberry showed up every single day, and the milk chocolate base kept even slightly fast brews sweet.
This lot is sold out, but Hydrangea rotates small Monteblanco lots through its lineup, including mango and coconut co-ferments and a washed Pink Bourbon from the same farm. I’d grab whichever one appears next. Hydrangea and the rest of the roasters, beans, and shops I keep coming back to are on our Favorites page.