Before there was Coffee Power, there was a single cup of Colombian Caturra that changed Chris Rosas's trajectory forever.
Every obsession has a beginning. For Coffee Power, it was a cup of Colombian washed Caturra from Cauca — a coffee so clean, so balanced, so transparently good that it was impossible to dismiss as a beverage. That cup is what we now call El Origen. The origin. The one that started everything.
Chris Rosas had drunk coffee his entire life. In Spain, where he grew up, coffee is practically a daily ceremony. The morning cortado at the bar, the after-lunch café solo, the occasional late espresso. He understood coffee as ritual. But he hadn't yet understood coffee as flavor. El Origen changed that. It arrived at a cupping table in Madrid, among a flight of six coffees. He sipped it, paused, and sipped it again. There was something in it that he recognized — not from other coffees, but from music. A clarity. A structure. A sense that every note was exactly where it should be.
Cauca is one of Colombia's most important growing departments, situated on the western side of the central Andes. The Caturra variety, a natural mutation of Bourbon, has been grown here since the 1940s. It produces smaller cherries, ripens consistently, and in the right hands, makes a coffee of remarkable precision. Ours comes from a cluster of small farms in the municipality of Cajibío, all between 1,600 and 1,900 meters.
The washed process strips everything back to the bean's essential character — citrus brightness, milk chocolate body, almond finish. It is not the most complex coffee in the collection. It is the most honest. And honesty, in coffee as in art, is harder to achieve than complexity.
