Roaster’s Choice: Apolo Wildlands

Bolivia isn’t an origin we get to feature very often, and that’s part of what made Apolo Wildlands stand out for this month’s Roaster’s Choice.

This organic washed coffee comes from Apolo in Bolivia’s La Paz region, a remote growing area where the eastern slopes of the Andes transition toward the Amazon Basin. It’s a landscape shaped by mountains, dense forest, dramatic changes in elevation and an incredible amount of biodiversity.

The kind of place that makes the name Wildlands feel pretty appropriate.

Coffee From the Edge of the Andes

Apolo Wildlands is produced by APCA, the Asociación de Productores de Café de Apolo, a cooperative of smallholder coffee farmers working throughout the Apolo region.

Many of these farms are located around the buffer zone of Madidi National Park, one of Bolivia’s remarkable protected landscapes. Coffee here is grown beneath diverse shade canopies alongside the surrounding forest rather than in large, open monocultures.

For APCA, improving coffee quality has meant investing in the entire process. The cooperative has worked with producers on better harvesting practices, wet-processing infrastructure, training and quality evaluation while maintaining a close connection to the forest ecosystem surrounding their farms.

Organic, Washed and High Grown

This lot is made up of Typica and Red Catuai grown between approximately 1,200 and 1,700 meters above sea level.

Once ripe cherries are harvested and sorted, the coffee is depulped and fermented before being washed and dried at the farm level for roughly two weeks.

That washed process is an important part of what we liked about this coffee. Rather than adding a heavy fermentation character, it lets the sweetness, fruit and more delicate tea-like qualities of the coffee come through cleanly.

Our Approach to the Roast

We’re keeping Apolo Wildlands on the lighter side.

There’s plenty of natural chocolate and caramel sweetness in this coffee already, so we didn’t want to push the roast far enough for those flavors to dominate everything else. A lighter profile gives the more interesting parts of the cup room to show themselves.

The result starts with familiar sweetness before opening into fruit and a softer, tea-like finish.

You’ll find smooth milk chocolate and caramelized sugar up front, followed by a subtle red grape character and the delicate complexity of oolong tea. It’s sweet and approachable, but there’s enough going on underneath to make it especially fun as the cup begins to cool.

Why Apolo Wildlands?

Roaster’s Choice has always been about giving us room to explore.

Sometimes we find an unusual process. Sometimes it’s a particular producer. And sometimes we come across a coffee from a part of the world we simply don’t see very often.

Apolo Wildlands checks all three boxes we look for: an interesting origin, a compelling producer story and a cup that gives us something different to roast.

From smallholder farms surrounded by the wild landscape of Apolo to our roaster here on Long Island, this is exactly the kind of coffee Roaster’s Choice was created to showcase.