Origin: Dipilto, Nueva Segovia, Nicaragua
Producer: Olman Valladárez, Finca Los Alpes
Variety: Gesha
Process: Natural, dried whole cherry
Altitude: 1500masl
Awards: 1st Place, Cup of Excellence 2026
Tasting Notes: Chocolate covered pineapple, mango, passionfruit
Best for: Pour over, filter

Somewhere in a small German church, an organ is playing a John Cage piece called "As Slow As Possible." It started in 2001. It's scheduled to finish in 2640. Nobody alive will hear the ending, and that's sort of the point.

Natural processing runs on the same principle, just compressed into a few weeks. You take the whole coffee cherry, fruit and all, and lay it out to dry. Then you wait. The fruit ferments against the seed the entire time, pushing sugar and acid inward, and every single day is a day something can go wrong. Too much sun and it cooks. Too much damp and mold takes the whole bed. Rush it and you get nothing worth the trouble. Do it right and the fruit ends up inside the bean, like a tea bag left in on purpose.

Olman Valladárez does it right, and he does it slowly. Twenty-four years on these slopes have taught him what Finca Los Alpes will give and exactly when to ask. That's a long apprenticeship for a piece of land, and it shows up in small places: which beds get covered at two in the afternoon, which lots come off a day early, when to leave well enough alone.

The farm sits in the Dipilto Mountains of Nueva Segovia, up where northern Nicaragua runs out of room and hands the ridgeline over to Honduras. It's cool up there, and the nights run long and cold, so the cherries ripen on their own schedule instead of the calendar's. Dipilto has quietly been one of Central America's great coffee addresses for decades, though it rarely gets the press that Panama and Colombia do.

The Gesha trees are the youngest things on the farm. Gesha is a famously difficult variety, and it rewards exactly one approach, which is doing everything the hard way. Olman's young trees took first place at the 2026 Cup of Excellence, the coffee world's closest thing to a blind taste-off with real stakes. It isn't the first time his name has been called.

What lands in your cup is chocolate covered pineapple, mango and passionfruit, sweet and thick and unmistakably tropical. We put it in a glass jar, which we don't normally do, because this lot isn't normal. It's MAGIC.