Gatugi washing station sits high enough that the afternoons collapse into rain almost every day. It makes drying difficult and cupping tables damp, and it produces the most structured coffee we buy.

This year the lot arrived tasting of blackcurrant skin and brown spice, which is roughly what we hoped for and rarely get. It is on the menu as Second Floor.

The rain isn't incidental to that flavor, it's likely the reason for it — the slower, interrupted drying seems to concentrate something in the cherry that a clean, uninterrupted dry doesn't produce, though nobody at the station claims to fully understand why, only that it happens most years and this year it happened well.

We committed to next season before we left the station. Sometimes the decision is that easy, and sometimes the easiest decisions are the ones worth trusting most.