Artwork to come
Ojai, the pink moment, orchard rows going gold
Brief · A vintage mid-century travel postcard illustration. Style: printed like cheap vintage four-colour lithography, with a COARSE VISIBLE HALFTONE DOT SCREEN across the entire image — especially sky and water. Fine stipple and engraved tonal detail underneath the screen, but no bold black outlines, no woodcut, no comic ink, no photorealism, no 3D, no gloss, no digital gradients. Palette: warm cream-sand #f0d8c0 plus one blue — dusty teal #90c0c0 and slate #607878 when sun-bleached, saturated cyan #30c0d8 when vivid. Muted olive greens in foliage. Composition: the subject sits in the RIGHT THIRD; the left two-thirds is nearly empty sky, water or ground. Low horizon. No people, or figures so small they are marks. Scene: the Ojai valley at golden hour seen from a low ridge — orderly citrus orchard rows running to the middle distance, oak-studded hills behind, the Topatopa bluffs catching the last light. Mood: warm, generous, unhurried, the famous pink moment. Optional single small red accent: the light on the bluff face. No text, no lettering, no signage anywhere. 3:2 landscape, full bleed.
Bourbon
Bourbon Island (Réunion) · 1700s · via French missionaries
“Ojai at golden hour, and it knows it.”
Why this place
Ojai gets about twenty minutes a day when the Topatopa bluffs go pink and everybody stops what they are doing. It is not dramatic in the way the coast is dramatic. It is warm, ordered, agricultural and completely unhurried, and the light does all the work.
Bourbon is the same trick. Nothing in it shouts. The acidity is complex but never sharp, the sweetness runs to caramel and red fruit, and the body is round enough to hold it all together. It is the most generous coffee there is.
It is also, like the valley, agricultural rather than wild — one of the two ancestral cultivated arabicas, carried out of Yemen to Réunion and then to Latin America, and the parent of half the varieties below.
- In the cup
- Caramel and red fruit, a rounded body, complex acidity that never gets sharp
- Lineage
- One of the two ancestral cultivated arabicas, alongside Typica
- Grown
- Latin America, Rwanda, Burundi
- Altitude
- 1,200–2,000 m
- Brew it as
- Anything. Genuinely — it is the most forgiving good coffee there is
Our opinion
The best default coffee in the world. If you are buying for a household with mixed tastes, or you brew differently on different days, or you are simply not in the mood to concentrate — Bourbon.
It is the most forgiving good coffee there is. Over-extract it slightly and it goes a bit flat rather than bitter. Under-extract it and it goes quiet rather than sour. That tolerance is worth more in a real kitchen than a higher ceiling you will hit twice a month.
Low yielding, susceptible to almost everything, and still worth growing. Buy it whenever you see a good one.
Sources
Out past the break
The Typica Set
More from The Typica Set