What 85.5 actually means
The estate's top lot this season is a Robusta. That sentence is still doing a lot of work in specialty coffee.
The highest-scoring coffee on the estate for 2025–26 cupped at 85.5. It is a
100% Robusta, honey shade dried, logged under reference
D-AR-1225-02-AYFHSD.
For most of the last century that combination would have been treated as a category error. Robusta was the commodity species — high caffeine, harsh, grown for instant coffee and blended into espresso for crema and little else.
What changed
Processing. Hand-picking only mature cherries, then fermenting and drying them with the attention normally reserved for Arabica, converts tough cellular structures into a far wider range of flavour compounds. The cocoa–nut matrix in this lot — baker’s chocolate, cocoa powder, roasted walnut, a lift of dark cherry — is not something the species was thought capable of.
The Arabica natural came in just behind at 85.25, with an entirely different profile: berries, mandarin, papaya, melon, grapefruit.
Two species, two processes, same hillocks, a quarter of a point apart.