Kerehaklu - Natural Process - 2026

When producer Pranoy Thipiah invited us into his quality lab outside Kerehaklu Estate's processing site earlier this year, we couldn’t help but notice something intriguing: a small, lidded barrel filled with whole coffee cherries and a pink-hued liquid, with an aquarium bubbler slowly adding oxygen to the mixture. As it turns out, this small experiment would lead to a massive cup profile when scaled up. It's what Pranoy calls his Oxygenated Cascara Mosto Natural. As with many of Pranoy’s coffees, the process begins with the creation of a ‘mosto’ - a type of starter culture made by allowing coffee and its fruit to rest in water, resulting in a solution rich with the native microbes present on the coffee. While Pranoy sometimes makes his mosto with pulped coffee, for this lot he made it using a separate batch of whole coffee cherries. The particular cherries selected for this lot were then placed in sealed barrels with the resulting mosto. An additional element was the use of an aquarium bubbler to ‘oxygenate’ the liquid in the barrels throughout the resting period, after which the cherries were carefully dried on raised beds. As we suspected it would be, the flavor in the cup is dynamic and complex as the processing itself. From the fragrance on through the cup, we taste an abundance of wild red berries, juicy white grape acidity, and soft topical fruit flavors reminiscent of ripe papaya and mango.