Did you ever play the “telephone game” as a kid? You know, the one where one person chooses something to say and whispers it into their neighbors ear, then they whisper it into the next person’s ear and so on and so forth until the last person announces what they’ve heard, and everyone has a laugh at how different it is from the initial statement. Like when we played it here at the roastery and I whispered “I love working here, everyone is so nice” and at the end someone loudly proclaimed “Lex picks his nose and eats boogers!” That’s more or less the story of the popular emergence of the Pink Bourbon varietal.
Legend has it that after seeing strange pink cherries on a coffee tree in Colombia, the dispersion of this mysterious variety was traced through various neighboring farmers back to its origin. Nestled amongst “other” bourbons, there grew seemingly a cross-pollination or spontaneous mutation with distinctive pink cherries, a new and wonderful “Pink Bourbon.” Well this hot new coffee also just happened to cup very well, taking the specialty coffee world by storm on the cupping table, pairing a mysterious origin story with flavor-fueled intrigue.