Artwork to come
Abbot Kinney, Venice, mid-morning
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: Abbot Kinney Boulevard in Venice mid-morning — low white storefronts with awnings rendered as blank panels, a bougainvillea spilling over a wall, a bicycle against a kerb, a queue of three people outside a doorway. Mood: pretty, deliberate, slightly self-satisfied. Optional single small red accent: the bougainvillea. No text, no lettering, no signage anywhere. 3:2 landscape, full bleed.
Pink Bourbon
Colombia (Huila) · recent · and probably not a Bourbon at all
“Abbot Kinney. Lovely, fashionable, costs more than it should.”
Why this place
Abbot Kinney is a genuinely nice street. Low white storefronts, good bougainvillea, a queue outside somewhere at all times, and prices that have detached slightly from the rest of the county. None of that makes it unpleasant. It is simply aware of itself.
Pink Bourbon arrived the same way — a rose-coloured cherry, a beautiful name, a delicate floral cup of lychee and honeysuckle and stone fruit, and a price that climbed the moment the name got around.
And, like the street, the story is partly invented. Recent genetic work suggests it is not a Bourbon at all — it appears to descend from Ethiopian landrace stock rather than being a Bourbon mutation. The name is marketing that has hardened into fact.
- In the cup
- Floral and delicate — lychee, honeysuckle, stone fruit. Light-bodied and easy to overshoot
- Lineage
- Named for its rose-coloured cherry. Recent genetic work suggests an Ethiopian landrace origin rather than a Bourbon mutation — the name is a story, not a lineage
- Grown
- Huila, Colombia, and spreading fast because it sells
- Altitude
- 1,600–2,000 m
- Brew it as
- Filter, light roast, careful extraction. It will not survive being bullied
Our opinion
Lovely, and priced past its merits. It is a delicate, genuinely floral coffee that would be an easy recommendation at Caturra money and is a harder one at double.
It is also easy to overshoot. Light body, fine aromatics, and a very short distance between fragrant and thin. Filter, light roast, and be careful — it will not survive being bullied.
We would rather you spent the difference on an excellent washed Ethiopian, which is where a good deal of this flavour originally comes from and costs considerably less to admit it.
Sources
Out past the break
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