Experimental Barrel Conditioned
This week we’re thrilled to release for pre-order the newest addition to our menu: our Experimental Barrel Conditioned coffee. For this special release, we’ve taken our Rio Prieto Carbonic Maceration and conditioned it in American charred oak rum barrels from our friends at La Destileria in Jayuya. The result is a completely new sensory experience, one that brings together the natural sweetness of our Rio Prieto Community Lot with the oaky smokey goodness of these beautiful rum barrels. The result is as fun as it is sophisticated. In addition to just being an amazing new coffee, wonderful on its own, over ice, and as espresso, we’re especially excited about being able to present a coffee that combines these important touchstones of Puerto Rican agricultural heritage.
Puerto Rican coffee and sugar cane have played a pivotal role in shaping the island's identity. In the late 19th century, coffee quickly became a significant export for Puerto Rico, gaining global recognition for its exceptional flavor profiles and unique terroir.
Similarly, sugar cane thrived on the island, giving birth to plantations, centrales, and world-renowned distilleries that produced rum for an elite global audience. The widespread cultivation of coffee and rum in Puerto Rico forever transformed the island’s economy, culture, and societal structures.
Today, we at Forgotten Forest along with our friends La Destileria of Jayuya are weaving together these two iconic industries into a story that converges in this modern specialty Puerto Rican coffee conditioned in beautiful American charred oak rum barrels.
To tell this story, we take the best of our carbonic macerated green coffee and store it in oak rum barrels, allowing the essences of these distinct worlds to collide. The result is an entirely new sensory experience that brings together the distinct smoky spirit of La Destileria’s oak into harmony with our own vibrant expression of Puerto Rican coffee. This wonderful collaboration preserves and evolves the nature, culture, and craft of La Cordillera de Puerto Rico. We’re honored to present this exciting new chapter in Puerto Rico’s booming contemporary culinary world.
*note: there is no alcohol in this product!
We are especially honored to be collaborating with La Destileria Craft Spirits on this tremendous new coffee. Part of Puerto Rico’s tradition of culinary and craft excellence, La Destileria is a highly decorated distiller of Puerto Rican rum. Take a look at their award-winning rums (Award Winning Rums), which include a dazzling array of experimental and traditional rums. Similar to the way that we at Forgotten Forest are driving innovation in coffee, La Destileria crafts rums that honor Puerto Rico’s past while bringing the spirit world up to the present and beyond. Their rums, like the Puerto Rican pitorro caneshine, a “beastly rum” at 53% that honors Puerto Rico’s long tradition of homemade pitorro, and their stellar 106 Rum, a highly drinkable cask strength rum that we use for our conditioning, that redefine what a strong rum can be, beautifully toe the line between tradition and innovative experimentation.
La Destileria also uses their state-of-the-art distillery to raise awareness about Puerto Rico’s past and the specificity of their location in Jayuya in other ways, such as referencing local Taíno culture. For example, with their spiced and botanical rums, particularly their La Bohique, they honor the legacy of the Taíno people. “Bohique” is the name of a Taíno healer or shaman, one who, according to the Taíno, could speak with the gods. Like many indigenous cultures, the Taíno reserve a special place for the healers, the shamans, and the alchemists, who are able to transform our daily experience through the intentional transformation of material goods, like turning sugar cane into rum, or raw green coffee into roasted delight. There’s a reason alcoholic beverages are called “spirits.” That’s because the work of the shaman is to imbue us with the physical and spiritual characteristics of the land, of the culture, and of the people, drawing us out of our personal lives and into the social conviviality and symbolic world of art.
Our Experimental Barrel Conditioned Coffee is conditioned in charred oak barrels that were used to make 106 Rum, La Destileria’s award-winning cask strength rum that, like their pitorro caneshine, calls back to Puerto Rico’s long history of clandestine distilling activity, especially by early sugar cane fieldworkers. Like Puerto Rican coffee, in the early 20th century Puerto Rican rum was often far too expensive to buy for the workers who did the grueling labor of harvesting the sugar cane used to make it. But that didn’t stop these hard-working, often rural mountain-dwelling folks from siphoning off a bit of the crop to use for their own ends, creating a culture all their own, one that persists to this day. Made without access to commercial distilling equipment, pitorro, also known as caneshine or Puerto Rican moonshine, tends to be pretty harsh, so it is often softened using tropical fruits like papaya, guava, and tamarind. Today, pitorro is still popularly produced on the island, a testament to Puerto Rico’s powerful and hardy working class culture.
We’re thrilled to be presenting this innovative Puerto Rican experiment in culinary excellence, cultural history, and collaboration. We highly recommend making a trip to Jayuya (learn more here!) to visit the luscious rainforest, commune with Taíno petroglyphs, and enjoy imbuing your life with some of Puerto Rico’s spirit at La Destileria. And if you can’t, you can always pick up a bag of our Experimental Barrel Conditioned Coffee that, in its magical way, takes you a little of the way there.