Iris Estate Savage Illumination Dial

November 19, 2024

Cupping at Iris Estate for the first time was one of those moments I crave in coffee, where you experience “new” like you haven’t even imagined. The quality level is extremely high and the flavor profiles are unlike anything I had tasted to that point.

There are no words that fully convey how delightful Geisha coffee from Finca Deborah is. Jamison Savage has taken the queen of varieties and married her to wine processing, producing some of the most wildly beautiful coffees we've ever discovered. Jamison has become one of, if not the, foremost producer of Carbonic Maceration experimental geishas in the world. He’s dialed in very unique processes to combine different gases, different pressures, extended times, and different pH levels to create flavor profiles uniquely his own.

This coffee highlights the profile of a well-crafted Carbonic Maceration coffee. It’s pulped and then placed in CO2 under pressure to create a pre-fermentation environment. It is then dried as a washed coffee without fruit.

We taste notes of Mango, Pineapple, and Honeysuckle.

Our brewing recommendation:

Dose: 21g
Ratio: 1:17
Grind: Coarse
Bloom: 1:2 for 30s
Total Brew: 3:12
TDS: 1.39
Extraction: 19.8%

This coffee is a washed CM coffee, so you should expect high levels of acidity and sweetness that balance each other well, while the tasting notes are relatively delicate. Similar to Terroir, this coffee presents with a lot of floral notes, but features more sweetness in comparison. It should have a nice sparkling acidity alongside syrupy fruit, but subtle fruits like peach. Be sure to adjust your dial until you’re perceiving that lingering sweetness in the cup.