Artwork to come
An Orange County cul-de-sac, 7am, every driveway identical
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: a suburban Orange County cul-de-sac at seven in the morning — a curve of near-identical stucco houses with tile roofs, a young street tree in each front lawn, one garage door open, long early shadows across the road. Mood: orderly, productive, entirely unglamorous, faintly lovely. Optional single small red accent: one front door. No text, no lettering, no signage anywhere. 3:2 landscape, full bleed.
Caturra
Brazil · c. 1915 · a natural mutation of Bourbon
“An Orange County cul-de-sac at seven in the morning.”
Why this place
A cul-de-sac in Orange County at seven in the morning is one of the most efficient objects humanity has produced. Identical stucco, identical tile, a young tree per lawn, and the whole thing engineered to fit as many decent lives onto the land as possible.
Caturra is that engineering. It is Bourbon with a single gene changed — shorter internodes, a compact plant, fruit crowded along the branch, and dramatically more of it per hectare. It is why a lot of Latin American coffee exists at all.
The trade is small and honest. You keep most of Bourbon’s brightness and lose a good deal of its caramel. Nobody writes poems about it. Half the coffee you have enjoyed this year was it.
- In the cup
- Bright, clean, citric. Less of Bourbon's caramel and more of its acidity
- Lineage
- A single-gene dwarf mutation of Bourbon — shorter internodes, denser fruit
- Grown
- Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, and half of Latin America besides
- Altitude
- 1,000–1,800 m
- Brew it as
- Filter or espresso. It does both competently, which is rather its whole story
Our opinion
The most underrated word on a bag. Caturra is treated as filler — the thing listed when there is nothing more exciting to say — and a well-grown Caturra from a good altitude is a genuinely lovely coffee.
It is also the honest benchmark. If you want to know whether a roaster is any good, buy their cheapest Caturra rather than their showpiece. Anybody can make a Gesha taste interesting. Making a Caturra taste like something you want a second cup of is the actual job.
Works as filter, works as espresso, works with milk. It does not have a wrong answer, which is exactly why it never gets talked about.
Sources
Out past the break
The Typica Set
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