Artwork to come
The Grapevine, northbound, the long climb out of the basin
Brief · A vintage mid-century travel postcard illustration. Style: printed like cheap vintage four-colour lithography, with a COARSE VISIBLE HALFTONE DOT SCREEN across the entire image — especially sky and water. Fine stipple and engraved tonal detail underneath the screen, but no bold black outlines, no woodcut, no comic ink, no photorealism, no 3D, no gloss, no digital gradients. Palette: warm cream-sand #f0d8c0 plus one blue — dusty teal #90c0c0 and slate #607878 when sun-bleached, saturated cyan #30c0d8 when vivid. Muted olive greens in foliage. Composition: the subject sits in the RIGHT THIRD; the left two-thirds is nearly empty sky, water or ground. Low horizon. No people, or figures so small they are marks. Scene: the Interstate 5 climbing the Grapevine out of the Los Angeles basin — bare golden ridges, the road switching back up the grade, transmission towers marching over the summit, a truck grinding up the slow lane. Mood: hardy, unlovely, dependable. Heat haze. Optional single small red accent: the truck's tail lights. No text, no lettering, no signage anywhere. 3:2 landscape, full bleed.
Catuaí
Brazil · 1949 · Instituto Agronômico de Campinas
“The 5 over the Grapevine. Built for weather.”
Why this place
The Grapevine is not scenery. It is a four-thousand-foot climb out of the basin that trucks grind up in the slow lane at forty, in heat that peels paint, and it exists purely because everything north has to get south somehow.
Catuaí is built for that. Compact, hardy, high yielding, and able to hold onto its cherries in wind and rain that would strip a taller plant bare. It is a Mundo Novo crossed onto a Caturra — hybrid vigour bolted to a short frame.
The cup is mild, sweet, medium-bodied and rarely thrilling. It is also rarely bad, which over ten thousand hectares turns out to matter far more than a high ceiling.
- In the cup
- Sweet and mild, medium body, low-to-moderate acidity. Rarely thrilling, rarely bad
- Lineage
- Mundo Novo × Caturra — hybrid vigour crossed onto a compact plant
- Grown
- Brazil above all, plus Central America
- Altitude
- 800–1,600 m
- Brew it as
- Espresso, and in blends where you want body without argument
Our opinion
A blending coffee, and there is no shame in that. Catuaí gives an espresso blend body and sweetness without contributing an opinion of its own, which is precisely what you want from three of the four components.
Bought as a single origin it is usually a slightly dull experience and that is not the variety’s fault — it is what happens when something bred for reliability is asked to be interesting on its own.
Yellow Catuaí ripens later and is generally the better cup. If the bag tells you which, that tells you something about the roaster.
Sources
Out past the break
The Typica Set
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