Last week, Jooyeon Jeon of Momos Coffee in Busan, South Korea, earned the title of world’s best barista. The final phase of a global event, the World Barista Championship culminated in over 50 competitors from more than three dozen countries. The ask: to make four milk drinks and four original signature drinks in 15 minutes.
Reported by Sprudge, Jeon’s winning routine explored the role of carbohydrates in coffee flavor development. To highlight this, Jeon used coffee from La Palma y El Tucán, one of the most reputed coffee producers in the world. According to Sprudge, the Sidras varietal Jeon used was chosen because of its higher carb content.
The 13-hectare farm in central Colombia is a two-hour drive from Bogotá and operates as an innovation hub and coffee evangelist site, with a boutique hotel built on the premises. It does not produce a lot of coffee, and its beans are almost impossible to track down — but not quite.
While not the exact varietal that Jeon used, Arkansas’s Onyx Coffee Lab has 12-ounce and five-pound bags of a Castillo varietal grown in collaboration with the farm available for purchase on its site. Onyx’s beans still have much in common with the winning beans, including a shared micro-climate, high carbohydrate content and post-harvest fermentation. Onxy likens their flavor to blackberry wine, molasses, lime and chocolate.
