Quality arabica grows high up, between 1,200 and 2,000 metres, where cold nights slow the cherries down and give the seed time to turn dense and aromatic. It is one of the first things you learn when you start working in specialty, and it is also the reason the plantation in this story should not exist: it sits in the south of Gran Canaria, a few kilometres from Maspalomas, and it grows at zero metres above sea level.
The coffee that comes out of it is called Alt Zero, after the altitude, and on 23 September 2023 we presented it as the first lot of the Cafetales Maspalomas project.
Why coffee usually grows in the mountains
Altitude does a precise job. The higher you go, the further the temperature drops at night, and the more the plant slows down. The cherries ripen slowly, the sugars have time to build up, the seed grows compact instead of swollen and watery. That is where the live acidity and the aromatic complexity we look for in a specialty coffee come from. At sea level the usual outcome is the opposite: constant heat, fast ripening, a flat cup.
On Gran Canaria something else steps in. The ocean keeps temperatures mild all year with no violent swings, the soil is volcanic, and the Atlantic microclimate stretches out the ripening of the cherries the way altitude would. The result is a harvest spread across almost the whole year and a quality you would not expect at that height. On Suso's finca there are no pests either, and the plants are visibly well, which anyone who has walked through a tropical plantation knows is worth a great deal.
Suso's finca, in the south of the island
Almost all of Gran Canaria's coffee is in the north, in the Agaete valley, where some farms organise visits and sell what they grow to the people passing through. Suso's plot is on the other side of the island, in the municipality of San Bartolomé de Tirajana: around 600 Caturra plants, grown with no chemical products and natural fertiliser only, on gently sloping ground where papaya trees shade the coffee.
Antonio Perez Perez, who everyone calls Suso, grows coffee out of passion with his family, next to the papaya, avocado, oranges and bananas that end up in the village markets. Matteo Borea, founder of CoffeeStorming and third generation of the family roastery La Genovese in Albenga, met him in 2022 during a trip that had started for entirely different reasons: how we got there is a story we have told in full. That meeting became a collaboration that is still running, made of harvests worked together, processing trials and sacks carried to Italy by hand, with no importers and nobody in between.
Working a lot that changes every year
The first lot, the one presented in 2023, was a semi-washed with twenty-four hours of fermentation in water. Since then Suso and Matteo have kept trying different methods on the same parcel, and what you find in the catalogue today is a honey process. It is the luxury and the limit of very small lots at once: every harvest is a one off, and what you taste this year resembles last year's only from a distance.
While the project was still an idea, Paolo Scimone came in as well, a Q Grader and one of the Italian reference points in roasting, who believed in it and backed the case for a specialty coffee grown in Europe.
What a coffee grown at zero altitude tastes like
The first lot scored 80.50 points in specialty evaluation, and in the cup it comes out full bodied and round, with a light acidity and a profile that resembles nothing else we roast: pear, winter apple, cocoa, cedar and lemongrass. There is an almost herbaceous freshness to it, elegant, that catches out anyone expecting the chocolate and dried fruit of the South American classics.
Alt Zero is at its best as filter, where its bright notes come out one at a time, and it holds up well in an AeroPress for anyone after an elegant profile with some structure behind it. If filter is still unknown territory for you, we have written about what it is and how to brew it.
Hoya de Pineda, the brother in the north
A second coffee comes from the same island, and it is nearly the opposite of Alt Zero. Hoya de Pineda grows in the north, in the Valle de Guía, at 505 metres, where the climate is wetter and greener. Same Caturra variety, honey process, but a tropical, sunlit character: dark honey, caramel, ripe mango and a cocoa base, with a full body and a sweetness that stays a long time. It comes from the micro lots of Dani, a young man who tends a hundred or so plants in the gaps of his day, with the same care we found on the other side of the island.
A coffee that should not exist
The part we like most about this story is that it takes a rule apart. Good coffee grows close to home as well, on a European island a few hours away, tended by families who have never heard the words specialty coffee and who treat their plants the way you treat things you care about. The rest is work: picking by hand, trying one process after another, roasting and tasting again until the cup says what it should.
The lots are very small, they reach Albenga carried by hand and they end up on our 6 kg Giesen: when they are here they are here, and when they run out you wait for the next harvest. The Alt Zero page is the place to keep an eye on.