How Should Yellow Bourbon Coffee Be Brewed?

Yellow Bourbon from Brazil's Queen's Estate is a single-origin coffee with low acidity and mellow sweetness, a profile shaped by the Bourbon variety and the Mogiana region's terroir. The estate uses sun-dried processing, and the variety has won recognition in Brazil's Cup of Excellence competitions. Nutty, dark chocolate and caramel notes dominate the cup.

Bourbon reached Brazil in 1860 after leaving Bourbon Island, now Réunion, and became one of the main varieties of Brazilian coffee. Brazil is also a major source of the arabica coffee the world drinks. For pour-over, filter choice, grind size, water temperature and pouring technique are adjusted together to keep the sweetness clean and the bitterness controlled.

Brazilian coffee has always been known for its low acidity and mellow sweetness, unlike the bright floral and citrus acidity of African beans. Front Street Coffee often recommends a single-origin coffee to friends who prefer bitter-toned coffee—Brazil Queen's Estate Yellow Bourbon. This bean has a clear taste and clean resonance. This article will start with the origin and evolution of the Bourbon variety, introduce why Yellow Bourbon has won multiple awards in Brazil's COE competitions, then cover the terroir conditions of the Mogiana region and the sun-dried processing details of Queen's Estate, and finally share Front Street's complete pour-over recipe for filter choice, grind size, water temperature, and pouring technique, to help you brew this bean's signature nutty, dark chocolate, and caramel sweetness.

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African coffee beans often carry floral and citrus-like acidity, while Brazilian coffee takes another path—low acidity and mellow sweetness. The selected Yellow Bourbon variety from Brazil Queen's Estate coffee has a clear taste and clean resonance, and is a single-origin coffee Front Street often recommends to people who prefer bitter-toned coffee. Below, Front Street will discuss how to brew Brazil Queen's Estate coffee deliciously.

Yellow Bourbon Variety

By consulting materials, Front Street has learned that the varietal composition of Arabica coffee in the world cannot be separated from the two foundations, Typica and Bourbon, as well as the descendants they have produced. Bourbon is mainly popular in Central and South American countries and is one of the main varieties of Brazilian coffee.

The name Bourbon comes from Bourbon Island, which is now Réunion Island off the east coast of Africa. In the seventeenth century, this was French territory and was named Bourbon Island, only renamed at the end of the eighteenth century. In the eighteenth century, the French introduced round coffee beans from Yemen to Bourbon Island and let them take root and grow there. In 1860, Brazil brought round Bourbon back to the country for cultivation, and it later spread to various countries in Central and South America, becoming the oldest mother variety of Latin American coffee. Bourbon plants have short, round fruit and high-density coffee beans. Bourbon grown at high altitudes has high sweetness and bright acidity. It is an ancient and excellent variety along with Typica, but its resistance to leaf rust is better than Typica, and its flavor is no less impressive.

For common Bourbon, from flowering to ripe fruit, the color gradually changes from green to slightly yellow, red, and finally fully mature dark red, so it is called Red Bourbon. Front Street's Brazilian everyday coffee is selected from the pure-flavored Red Bourbon variety. There are also Bourbon varieties that do not turn red after ripening, but instead turn a rarer yellow or pink, namely Yellow Bourbon and Pink Bourbon.

Queen's Estate is most proud of the Yellow Bourbon variety, which, with its exquisite and delicate flavor, has won awards in multiple editions of Brazil's COE competition. Common Bourbon coffee changes from green to slightly yellow, orange-yellow, red, and finally fully ripe dark red, which is what we call Red Bourbon. Red Bourbon grown at high altitudes has a balanced flavor, rich aroma, and soft acidity. Front Street's everyday coffee is selected from Red Bourbon.

Yellow Bourbon does not produce cherry-red fruit at the mature stage, but yellow fruit, and was discovered in 1930. Later, research by the Campinas Agronomic Institute (IAC) found that plants with a dominant XcXc gene pair produce red berries; plants with a recessive xcxc gene pair produce yellow berries; in extremely rare cases, a plant with one dominant gene and one recessive Xcxc gene produces orange berries. Therefore, the "yellow" of Yellow Bourbon is due to genetic selection for color. Yellow Bourbon planted at high altitudes contains a large amount of fructose and can present a sweet and juicy flavor. It once swept Brazil's "Cup of Excellence" competition for two consecutive years, taking almost all of the top three awards, and became popular in the specialty coffee world!

Mogiana Queen's Estate

The Mogiana region is close to southern Minas, located in the northeast of São Paulo, and is listed alongside the Cerrado region and South Minas as one of Brazil's three major specialty regions. Unlike ordinary Brazilian coffee beans, Mogiana has a growing altitude of 1,100–1,250 meters, much higher than other areas of São Paulo. The difference in altitude also makes the temperature range greater, and the coffee quality higher. At the same time, the rolling terrain means Mogiana can only use semi-mechanized and purely manual picking of coffee cherries. Most of the coffee produced belongs to Brazil's specialty grade, namely Fine Cup, the grade with the best cup profile and the highest quality.

After picking ripe Yellow Bourbon coffee cherries, Queen's Estate uses sun-dried processing, allowing the coffee cherries to absorb more fruity sweetness during drying. Brazil is located near the equator, and because the harvest season happens to fall in the dry season, coffee cherries are very suitable for direct dehydration and drying through sun exposure.

However, the traditional "baking in the sun" process is very rough. After picking, the cherries are directly poured onto mud ground to dry, and the resulting coffee is easily mixed with an earthy taste, while uneven heating can produce negative notes of over-fermentation. Queen's Estate first pours the coffee cherries into a water tank and removes underripe fruit through flotation, then carries out the coffee in small batches on African raised beds with better airflow, turning it at irregular intervals, thereby avoiding earthy and over-fermented flavors, and its sweetness is also a step above the traditional sun-dried method.

Front Street Queen's Estate Coffee Pour-Over Reference

Front Street wants to highlight Queen's Estate's classic regional flavor, that is, its rich chocolate aroma, so Front Street uses a medium-dark roast. Through cupping, Front Street tastes that this Queen's Estate has a very obvious sweetness, so in brewing it uses a three-pour technique, hoping to present more layers in the coffee.

Because coffee beans enter their best flavor period 4–7 days after roasting, after this time (about a month and a half after roasting) the coffee's aroma may already have been lost and some woody flavor may have developed. To avoid this situation, Front Street only ships coffee beans freshly roasted within 5 days, so everyone can taste coffee with excellent flavor.

Filter: Medium-dark roasted coffee beans mainly present a rich and rounded mouthfeel. In response to this characteristic, Front Street chooses the slower-flow KONO dripper for extraction. The upper part of the KONO is a smooth curved surface, and the lower part has guide ribs one-third of its length. This allows the filter paper to fit the dripper more closely, restricting airflow upward so hot water can only flow downward, forming a siphon-style extraction effect and allowing the aromatic substances of the coffee grounds to be released more fully.

Grind size: Considering the darker roast, the texture of the coffee beans becomes looser. After grinding into powder, it easily absorbs more water and releases more soluble substances, and can easily bring out unpleasant miscellaneous bitterness such as woodiness. Front Street Coffee (FrontStreet Coffee) baristas will make the grind coarser, making the coffee particles larger and reducing over-extraction. Here, use a medium grind (70–75% passing through China standard No. 20 sieve).

Water temperature: When brewing light-to-medium roasted coffee beans, Front Street uses a higher water temperature to release the aromatic substances from high-density coffee beans. But medium-dark roasted Brazilian coffee, because it has undergone a longer caramelization reaction, if the same high-temperature hot water is used, the coffee easily presents a thick and burnt bitterness. Appropriately lowering the water temperature can help us reduce a certain amount of bitterness. Front Street uses a water temperature of 87–88°C.

Coffee grounds will absorb about twice their own weight in water. Front Street generally uses 15 grams of coffee grounds, extracts at a 1:15 coffee-to-water ratio, and finally obtains close to 200 ml of coffee liquid, that is, 1–2 servings.

Filter: KONO dripper

Water temperature: 87–88°C

Coffee dose: 15 grams

Coffee-to-water ratio: 1:15

Grind size: Medium grind level (70% passing through China standard No. 20 sieve)

Use twice the coffee grounds' weight in water to wet the coffee bed, forming a dome and blooming for 30s. Then, with a small stream, pour in circles from the inside out until 125g and pause. When the coffee bed drops to half the height of the dripper, continue with the same fine stream to pour the third stage to 225g, until all the coffee liquid has filtered through, then remove the dripper. The time is about 2 minutes.

Hand-brewed Brazil Queen's Estate coffee smells of lemon, nuts, and peanuts. On the palate, it has a very rich nutty, dark chocolate, and caramel flavor, with obvious sweetness and a creamy, smooth mouthfeel, overall quite rounded.

The above content is compiled by CoffeeHunters, a coffee news website.